Word: destroyer
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...from technology. Suburbs are largely products of the automobile. (In the forthcoming book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt notes the irony of Henry Ford, in his 60s, building a replica of his hometown--gravel roads, gas lamps--to recapture the "saner and sweeter idea of life" he had helped destroy.) And in a thousand little ways--from the telephone to the refrigerator to ready-made microwavable meals-technology has eroded the bonds of neighborly interdependence. Among the Aranda Aborigines of Australia, the anthropologist George Peter Murdock noted early this century, it was common for a woman to breast-feed...
First, a computer virus is inserted into the aggressor's telephone-switching stations, causing widespread failure of the phone system. Next, computer logic bombs, set to activate at predetermined times, destroy the electronic routers that control rail lines and military convoys, thus misrouting boxcars and causing traffic jams. Meanwhile, enemy field officers obey the orders they receive over their radios, unaware the commands are phony. Their troops are rendered ineffective as they scatter through the desert. U.S. planes, specially outfitted for psychological operations, then jam the enemy's TV broadcasts with propaganda messages that turn the populace against its ruler...
...information system completely. "The bits will get through," he contends. Enemy armies will always find ways to get messages past electronic jamming. With networked microcomputers, cellular phones and video conferencing available, an enemy leader can disperse his command centers to many locations, making it difficult for an attacker to destroy them all. And psy-warriors must compete with a blizzard of electronic media outlets such as commercial television networks, CNN and the Internet for the attention. Cutting off Saddam's telephones and electrical power didn't topple him during Desert Storm...
...counter this, LeMay actually proposed "a nuclear Sunday punch," a pre-emptive strike against the Soviets. In 1949 he wanted to send an armada of U.S. planes, carrying the entire Los Alamos stockpile--numbering more than 100 atom bombs--to destroy 70 Soviet cities. It was out of fear that a hot-headed general like LeMay might be able to launch a nuclear attack on his own that the Kennedy Administration later instituted a complex chain of commands governing the use of nuclear weapons...
...mistaken for or equated to the Holocaust. The sheer magnitude of the crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jewish population of Europe outweigh the crimes committed by any group in the former Yugoslav Republic. But something of the same concept is ineluctably present. The motivation to destroy another person or group of people simply for having some cultural or religious characteristic, regardless of new tags like "ethnic cleansing," echoes too strongly of genocide. And that is where I thought that America drew the indelible line between right and wrong. Regardless of situational complexities, regardless of circumstance, I have always...