When the legend of Pandora's box appeared, was it really a glimpse into the future? At first, it only seems like any other legend, but if you substitute weapons of mass destruction and terrorists for the evil spirits, you have one of the great problems of our times. That problem is how do you keep terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction in the future? As technology moves on, it might even get to be possible for anyone to make one of these devices. Nuclear weapons have become one of the greatest threats to the human race that was caused by man. Their are other threats that are almost as bad, those of biological and chemical weapons and they are easier to make. We sure have gotten ourselves in a mess.

Are we putting ourselves in the same situation again? The space race could threaten man again. I don't know why, but you hardly ever see any articles talking about all the countries and companies that are trying to develop space vehicles and how they could eventually be used against us. Just think about this for one second. A company develops a space vehicle and decides to sell it to anyone who has enough cash to buy it. A terrorist organization backed by a third world country buys one. This group has just gotten a nuclear bomb or has found out that there are some nukes in space that were kept secret. They get into their new space plane and get a shinny new nuke and orbit the earth. Now they demand a huge ransom or out the nuke goes while it is over a large country, most likely the U.S. It doesn't even have to be an accurate bombing just as long as it can hit U.S. soil. We have just compounded our troubles by letting terrorists get a delivery system.

Maybe buying a space vehicle wouldn't even be necessary. If we develop passenger planes that fly outside the atmosphere maybe one of them would be hijacked and taken somewhere, the passengers unloaded and a nuke put on board and the entire craft crashed into something. It seems that we are ripe for something to happen as new technologies develop things that are great for peacetime use, but are also frightful as weapons. What are we doing to guard ourselves against these possibilities? I have no way of proving this, but I believe that one of these defenses has already been put into place and that is the Aurora, a secret plane that is said to be capable of space flight. It would be able to shoot down any rogue space ship. If there are any nukes up there, satellites that can knock out other satellites are being developed, of course all this would be denied if you asked any of the countries developing them. The truth of the matter is that this is a world problem. If we ever needed an international police force, we need one now. I am talking about a force that would have jurisdiction in any country and be respected by the country that it is in.

The world was very lucky that Germany didn't wait a few more years before starting World War II. You don't have to be a genius to see what they were able to do even while bombs were raining down on them. If they would have waited until 1945 to start the war, they would have been unbeatable. They might have even had an orbital vehicle by then. Can you imagine that, Nazis controlling space? Hey it almost happened. There we would have been, sending in prop planes and the Nazis responding with fast jets. We would have been using machine guns from our aircraft and they would have been using air to air missiles. They might have had nuclear weapons by then. They were only slowed down in the development of nukes by the war. They had rocket planes and had even designed flying saucers. They also had designed vertical take off planes and V2 rocket bombs. They certainly would have been up there, out of our reach, as we sent up our pitiful weapons to try and stop them. Hitler even had the plans drawn up to build a battleship that would have been three times bigger than anything afloat.

I would really like to know what other technologies we are getting involved in that pose a risk to us. I am sure that somewhere and probably in several somewheres, there is research going on that is extremely dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands. That is just the nature of our society. The military is forever looking for new weapons and as we all know, you just can't keep weapons technology from spreading. There hasn't been a weapon made yet that has remained secret to my knowledge, of course there could be many things out there that I know nothing about, but if history is any indication, I am right.

I don't know what the answer is. I do know that maybe some weapons shouldn't be developed. If a deadly weapon is invented like a nuke that fits into a case or pocket, I know that it is a tremendous danger and would really not be necessary as it is more of a personal weapon. Sure the military would argue that they need their toys and make some case for it, but in reality the risk of developing a weapon that can fall into the wrong hands is far greater than any benefit we would get from it. In the past, it seemed that every military secret we had was stolen sooner or later, mostly sooner. I think that this possibility should be incorporated into the thinking about the development of such weapons and some sort of balance in weapons development achieved. If every nuke in the world was destroyed it would be no loss. The military would say that we need our nukes to counter countries with very large armies, but many of these countries have nukes also, negating our use of nukes. We are not about to drop a nuke on a nuclear armed country that will send their nukes this way. So, in the final analysis, what good are nukes? If you use them then the fall out will drift over friendly countries making enemies of them. Nukes are only good as a revenge weapon. If you saw that your country was about to be hit with hundreds of nuclear tipped missiles you would then launch your nukes at the offending country but if neither country had nukes this could not happen.

Lets stop already with the mass destruction weapons that will never be used by countries any how. The only ones that would use them are the terrorists. In effect we are only developing weapons of mass destruction for terrorists.