In late 1945, in a context of restored peace, American leaders set about constructing the postwar international order. Among the issues they confronted were the establishment of the United Nations and the reaction of U.S. citizens to the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The latter especially provoked a short-lived mood of uncertainty about the future of humankind in the nuclear age.

The questions on American minds at the time were: Would atomic bombs someday be turned against us? Would this new “postwar” end, as the one that followed World War I had, with some great power rejecting the restraints of international law and morality and enfeebling the new world body? In June 1950 President Harry S. Truman, a firm believer in the primacy of power politics over law, gave his definitive answer to the second question by trampling on the letter and spirit of the UN Charter. Specifically, he illegally committed the U.S. to war in Korea on his own authority, without Congressional approval or prior authorization from the UN Security Council, and his Sec. of State, Dean Acheson, dismissed the UN Charter as “impracticable.”

The United States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s deterrence theory worked—nations knew that if they used the awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant and the equations of military power that existed in the period after World War Two no longer hold.

When President Vladimir Putin in his State of the Union speech last year called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, cold warriors on both sides of the Atlantic pounced on the statement as fresh evidence of Russia's imperial ambitions.

Very few were prepared to accept Putin's statement at face value - a powerful articulation of an incontrovertible fact from the Russian point of view. The fact remains that half a million Soviet citizens perished during the painful transition, and 50 million people were displaced. Last week, on the anniversary of the August 19 coup that led to the disbandment of the Soviet Union, public opinion in Russia looked back at the events 15 years ago as a crude power struggle devoid of any high principles.

[This is the second article posted on the consequences of weapons, including nuclear weapons, proliferation, for contemporary warfare. It follows Gabriel Kolko's The Great Equalizer. Lessons From Iraq and Lebanon.]

The events of September 2001 disproved the assumption that only a state could make war on another state. Now Hezbollah's confrontation with Israel has provided further education about how the world is changing. Hezbollah's campaign is a clear sign of how the democratization of missile technology – cruise missile technology, in particular – is reshaping global realities.

While the world's attention is focused on record high oil prices, water, like oil, is increasingly emerging as a catalyst for international instability and conflict as the recent upsurge in violence in Sri Lanka illustrates. On July 20, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.) shut down the Maavilaru dam's sluice gate near the town of Kantalai in the northeastern Trincomalee district, which cut off water supplies for 60,000 people in governmentcontrolled areas. This led the Sri Lankan military to commence an aerial bombardment of Tiger positions and a ground offensive to gain control of the reservoir's control point. The Tigers claim that their actions were sparked by the government's failure to build a water tower to supply L.T.T.E.-controlled areas and responded by going on the offensive in Mutur. With more than 500 people killed since fighting erupted over the disputed waterway, the 2002 ceasefire has now collapsed in all but name.

Americans have long been warned that running large, continuous deficits courts disaster. ‘We are living on borrowed money and borrowed time’, was the way Walter Mondale put it to the 1984 Democratic Convention, when the US government's cumulative deficit was some $7 trillion less than it is today. Three years later, a spate of cartoons and op-eds would depict the 1987 stock-market crash as a vicious hangover; the just deserts of a wastrel nation. The ever- accumulating deficits so frightened the first President Bush that he famously reneged on his ‘read my lips’ promise not to raise taxes. In 1992, Ross Perot launched the most successful third-party presidential candidacy since Eugene Debs by making the rivers of red ink his central campaign issue. Clinton's great boast was that he managed temporarily to close the government deficit, although the trade deficit continued to grow during his administration.

[Sponsored by the Nagasaki Peace Museum last July 9, the top Japanese researcher on Japan's wartime biological weapons (BW) program, Tsuneishi Keiichi, gave a public lecture in Nagasaki together with the director of China's Unit 731 War Crimes Museum in Harbin. Tsuneishi's talk, entitled “The Image and Reality of Unit 731,” explained the declassified American intelligence records he discovered in 2005, revealing that U.S. Occupation authorities not only granted immunity from prosecution to Japanese scientists in exchange for their unrivaled BW data, but also made direct cash payments to obtain their experimental results. (“The United States and the Japanese Mengele,” a recent Japan Focus article by Christopher Reed, reproduced the 1947 documents from GHQ's G-2 intelligence unit.)

“We got on the boat in Busan. Don't know where we got off… We came on a fishing boat. A little boat, it was. The waves were that high, and we went right over them. What month would it have been? Can't remember now.

They say you really get to know people when you go on a boat with them, or live with them. It was so dark in that boat, you couldn't even tell who was in there. Everyone jammed together in this little space - so small, we were sitting right on top of one another. When people said their kids were being smothered, they were just ignored. There were dozens of people - thirty or forty in that little boat. That's why we were sitting on top of each other. It was so crowded you couldn't eat rice or anything like that. Two nights we went without eating. Of course in those days it was a people-smuggling boat [yami no fune]. People came on those boats from Jeju or Busan - that was when I was twenty-nine”

The Japanese media is obsessed with the kidnapping of its citizens by North Korea. David McNeill suggests other stories the media might pursue as enthusiastically.

All the pain of the tragedy that has befallen their family is etched in the crumpled faces of Yokota Shigeru and Sakie. Most parents can only imagine the horror of losing a young child, but after years of believing their daughter Megumi was the victim of a random attack in 1977, the Yokotas learned that she had been snatched by North Korean spies. They still don't know if she is alive or dead.