JH Going Ballistic

I once asked a journalist friend, who had been chained inside the courtroom every single day of the O.J. Simpson trial, the obvious question. "Did he do it?" Or had the LAPD, instead, planted a boatload full of fake "evidence," in an effort to frame the famous defendant? "How do you know," she replied, "that it wasn't both?" These days, working as a policy wonk on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, I am sometimes asked whether the danger of nuclear terror is "real" -- or whether, instead, certain modern-day Machiavellis are manipulating our most nightmarish fears, to promote their own cynical political agendas. "How do you know," I am inclined to reply, "that it isn't both?" Nuclear Terror -- Mission Impossible? During the Cold War, it became commonplace to observe that "mutually assured destruction," or MAD, was... [read full story]