Years ago, while living in England, I saw some graffiti on an overpass that declared “War is Obsolete”. This was in the glory days of the “Ban the Bomb” movement. There were well-intentioned people who favored unilateral nuclear disarmament. The British could afford to think that way, because the American bombs could be counted on to keep the Russians in check.

At the time, I wrote a magazine article that opined that war was far from obsolete—that history told us Man had never developed a weapon he did not eventually use. Time passed, and so did my opinion. In fact, it has been 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and no one has been killed by a nuclear weapon in all that time. No one could hope to win a nuclear war, and so there was no reason why any sane person or nation would start one. In all those intervening years, the only nations that had any nuclear weapons were allegedly sane.

Well, more time has passed, and now we have to deal with powers that show very clear signs of not being very sane. And the insanity has allowed nuclear materials and technology to leak out of their tightly sealed boxes and into the hands of people who are certifiably insane. Mutually Assured Destruction was a reasonable doctrine in a world where we were dealing with reasonable people who loved life. Now we are dealing with unreasonable people who care nothing for life, not even their own. You could even say that they love death.

I don’t think we yet understand the religion or the psychology of the 9/11 hijackers who brought down the World Trade Center. But with the advent and spread of the suicide bomber, everyone is now thinking that we will ultimately have to deal with nuclear suicide bombers, and that is truly unimaginable.