War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century.

If wars cannot be prevented, can they at least be tamed? Alvin and Heidi Toffler offer some interesting answers.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Leon Trotsky

Trotsky's sardonic assessment remains as valid today as in his own time. The Cold

To begin with the really bad news, nuclear weapons may become so widely dispersed in the future that they may hardly be controllable at all. Even small groups like Asian warlords or Mafia families may have atomic bombs. One of the gloomiest authorities on the subject, report the Tofflers, is Carl Builder, a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation who previously served as the director of nuclear safeguards for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Builder believes that nuclear diffusion may eventually reach down to single individuals. "It will be possible for an individual to make a nuclear device from materials which are in commerce," Builder says.

An even more likely possibility, at least in the near future, is that a nation may be attacked, yet have no idea who its adversary is. Imagine this scenario:

A nuclear device explodes without warning 20 blocks north of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. The blast destroys not only the buildings on Capitol Hill--the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court, and Library of Congress--but most of the central part of Washington, including the White House, Executive Offices of the President, Treasury, and many government agencies.

Who planted the bomb? No one knows. All that seems clear is that those individuals and groups who claim to be responsible probably were not. So the United States is left with an uncomfortable dilemma. People howl for vengeance, but no one knows where to aim the avenging rockets. Then, the unknown enemy deliberately arranges to throw suspicion on an innocent nation, which is immediately obliterated to assuage the public thirst for blood.

Almost as frightening among future possibilities is the genetically engineered superplague that might wipe out half the population of a city. The Soviets were reported to be seeking such superplagues before the Cold War ended, and it is uncertain what has happened to the pathogens developed. Meanwhile, there is speculation that biogenetic research may eventually lead to agents that can identify certain races by their DNA so that they could be selectively infected with disease. Such a "race bomb" could speed the work of future "ethnic cleansers."

Happily, the Tofflers' discussion of the ultimate horrors of war is balanced by their interest in "anti-war"--efforts aimed at either preventing war or making it less terrible. One path to anti-war is through technologies that enable one side to defeat the other with minimum bloodshed. Nonlethal weapons--tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.--are already widely used to control civil disturbances. Other possibilities include ultrasound that causes people to become disoriented and nauseated but leaves no permanent aftereffect; laser rifles that blind people but only temporarily; and calmative agents that can be sprayed on people to make them groggy. In the future, fierce battles might be fought with such weapons without anyone getting killed.

Even better, future wars might be fought with robot soldiers, who could blow each other to bits without any human life being lost. The Gulf War set an impressive standard for a war with few casualties (at least among the Allies). One way this was accomplished was by using small, pilotless planes under the control of human tele-operators miles away to perform reconnaissance missions, check on bomb damage, search for mines, and perform other dangerous work. One of these RPVs (remotely piloted vehicles) was shot down, but there was no human pilot aboard to suffer.

If humans must fight, casualties could be reduced by turning the combatants from men into supermen so that fewer would become casualties. In one concept, a soldier would be put into a sort of exoskeletal suit that would allow him to "leap tall buildings with a single bound." Already, a project team is working on such a superman concept at the U.S. Army's Human Engineering Laboratory at Aberdeen, Maryland.

Completely new types of bloodless warfare are also possible. For instance, computer viruses might temporarily wipe out an enemy's military communications and economic system, forcing it to surrender.

War and Anti-War is a useful book, strongly recommended to anyone who wants to know more about the strange new wars that we may face in the years ahead. From this book, one may draw several conclusions: First, wars will almost certainly continue to occur, at least through the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Second, they won't necessarily get worse than they have been in the past: There is a possibility, at least, of relatively bloodless wars. Third, true peace will likely depend on the will of the great nations to cooperate with each other in curbing all those nations, groups, and individuals who might endanger peace. Fourth, if we want peace, we must devote more effort to anti-war. If each government had a well-financed Ministry of Anti-War, wars might be greatly gentled, and maybe eliminated, in the century ahead.