For a book about the all-too-human “passions of war,” my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon — honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth — it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms.  After all, certain [...]

“Tomamos las armas para abrir paso a un mundo en el que ya no sean necesarios los ejércitos“. Subcomandante Marcos “Si quieres la paz prepárate para la guerra”, decían los romanos del imperio. No se equivocaron. El fenómeno de la guerra es tan viejo como la humanidad, y según van las cosas nada indica [...]

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. [...]

How the President and the Pentagon Prop Up Both Middle Eastern Despots and American Arms Dealers If you follow the words, one Middle East comes into view; if you follow the weapons, quite another. This week, the words will take center stage.  On Thursday, according to administration officials, President Obama will “reset” American policy in the [...]

Estos artefactos dispersan municiones de gran potencia en una amplia zona, no pueden ser lanzadas con precisión y suponen un grave riesgo para la población Las fuerzas del líder libio, Muamar Gadafi, han atacado con bombas de racimo de fabricación española y con proyectiles tierra-tierra zonas residenciales de Libia, según testimonios de testigos y [...]

Question: How does a mentally unstable man who was kicked out of school and had run-ins with the law buy such a serious weapon? The weapon reportedly used in the mass murders in Tucson was a serious weapon – a Glock 19, semi-automatic pistol, with an extended magazine. Some weapons like that were illegal [...]

The world has entered a new arms race, but what justifies this global military addiction? The world has entered a new arms race at a time of relative peace, totalling $1.5 trillion, that is $217 for every person on the planet. Over the last decade, Washington has doubled its military budget, fuelling massive military build-ups around the [...]

One of the strangest aspects of these last years when two administrations, the U.S. intelligence community, and the American media have focused on, obsessed about, speculated wildly about, and generally chewed over a single potential proliferation story -- Iran's nuclear program -- is how little other weapons proliferation stories even qualify as news. I'm excepting, of course, the usual alarms over possible nuclear weapons developments in North Korea, Syria, and the like. And I'm certainly not referring here to the estimated 200 to 400 nuclear weapons in Israel's undeclared arsenal that hardly rate a peep in our media. I'm thinking about us.

Cluster bombs are in the news again, thanks to a recent report from Amnesty International. The human rights agency has confirmed that 35 women and children were killed following the latest US attacks on an alleged al-Qaeda hideout in Yemen. Initially, there were attempts to bury the story, and Yemen officially denied that civilians were killed as a result of the December 17 attack on al-Majala in southern Yemen. However, it has been simply impossible to conceal what is now considered the largest loss of life in one single US attack in the country. If the civilian casualties were indeed a miscalculation on the part of the US military, there should no longer be any doubt about the fact that cluster munitions are far too dangerous a weapon to be utilized in war. Yet some countries still refuse to ban their production and use.

Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we're also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike. In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of "globalization" which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It's a nasty combination, this globalization of death.