| Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give a defence industry and to those whom the gods wish to make mad, they provide nuclear weapons. MAD, in the macabre glossary of nuclear terms, is an acronym of Mutual Assured Destruction, the strategy followed by the two post-war superpowers, the United States and the former USSR, into the 1970s, until it was superseded by the policy of nonproliferation and negotiated arms reductions, after both superpowers released that they had accumulated enough weaponry to annihilate each other but could not muster the crucial resolve to make that first irreversible strike against each other’s territories. |
| Today, ironically, it is not that arsenal - sufficient to make Earth into a flaming rival of the sun - that threatens the world. The new danger is not from these two Goliaths but from the by-products of their own guile, China and the smaller Davids such as Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan whom they taught to use slingshots for peaceful purposes but cannot now seem to prevent from applying to more sinister ambitions. |
Published in THE NATION 1 July 1993, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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