The soul apparently needs amorous sadness. It is a form of consciousness that brings its own unique wisdom. Criminal homicide is the culmination of an intense interchange between an offender and victim. Transactions resulting in murder involved the joint contribution of the offender and victim to the escalation of a “character contest,” a confrontation in which at least one, but usually both, attempt to establish or save face at the other’s expense by standing steady in the face of adversity. Such transactions additionally involved a consensus among participants that violence was a suitable if not required means for settling the contest. These are the occasions in which situated transactions resulted in violent death. However, examination of the development of these situated interchanges is not to argue that such transactions have no historical roots. In almost half of the cases there had preciously occurred what might be termed rehearsals between the offender and victim. These involved transactions which included the escalations of hostilities, and sometimes, physical violence. In twenty-six percent of these cases, the offender and, sometimes, victim entered the present occasion on the assumption that another hostile confrontation would transpire. Whether or not murderous episodes had such rehearsals, an examination of all cases bring to light a conception of the transaction resembling a “face game.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

 The offender and victim, at times with the assistance of bystanders, make “moves” on the basis of the other’s moves and the position of their audience. While these moves are not always of the same precise content or degree, it was possible to derive as set of time-ordered stages of which each share certain basic properties. Stage I The opening move in the transactions was an event performed by the victim and subsequently defined by the offender as an offense to “face,” that image of self a person claims during a particular occasion or social contact. What constitutes the real or actual beginning of this or any other type of transaction is often quite problematic for the researcher. The victim’s activity, however, appeared as a pivotal event which separated the pervious occasioned activity of the offender and victim from their subsequent violent confrontation. Such a disparaging and interactionally disrupting event constitutes the initial move. While the form and content of the victim’s move varied, three basic types of events cover all cases. In the first, found in over forty-one percent of the cases, the victim made some direct, verbal expression which the offender subsequently interpreted as offensive. This class of events was obviously quite broad. Included were everything from insults levied at some particular attribute of the offender’s self, family, or friends to verbal tirades which disparaged the overall character of the offender. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

Case 34 The offender, victim, and two friend were driving toward the country where they could consume their wine. En route, the victim turned to the offender, both of whom were located in the back seat, and stated: “You know, you really got some good parents. You know, you’re really a son-of-a-b*tch. You’re a leech. The whole time you were out of a job, you were living with them, and weren’t even paying. The car you have should be your father’s. He’s the one who made the payments. Any time your dad goes to the store, you’re the first in line to sponge off him. Why don’t you grow up and stop being a leech?” The offender swore at him, and told him to shup up. But the victim continued, “Someone ought to come along and really F*ck you up.” A second type, found in thirty-four percent of the cases, involved the victim’s refusal to cooperate or comply with the requests of the offender. The offender subsequently interpreted the victim’s action as a denial of his ability or right to command obedience. This was illustrated in transactions where parent murdered their children. When the parent’s request that the child eat dinner, stop screaming, or take a bath went unheeded, the parent subsequently interpreted the child’s activity as a challenge to rightful authority. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

The third type of event, found in twenty-five percent of the cases, involved some physical or nonverbal gesture which the offender subsequently defined as personally offensive. Often this gesture entailed an insult to the offender’s prowess involving pleasures of the flesh, and took the form of affairs or flirtation: Case 10 When the victim finally came home, the offender told her to sit down; they had to talk. He asked her is she was “fooling around” with other men. She stated that she had, and her boyfriends pleased her more than the offender. The offender later stated that “this was like a hot iron in my gut.” He ripped her clothes off and examined her body, finding scars and bruises. She said that her boyfriends liked to beat her. His anger magnified. Although the content and the initial production of these two events varied, each served to disrupt the social order of the occasion. Each marked the opening of serious yet tranquil order came to be transactions involving an argumentative “character contest.” Stage II In all cases ending in murder the offender interpreted the victim’s previous move a personally offensive. In some cases the victim was intentionally offensive. However, it is plausible that in other cases the victim was unwitting. In Case forty-three, for instance, the victim, a five-week old boy, started crying early in the morning. The offender, the boy’s father, ordered the victim to stop crying. The victim’s crying, however, only heightened in intensity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

The victim was too young to understand the offender’s verbal order, and persistent crying may have been oriented not toward challenging his father’s authority, but toward acquiring food or a change of diapers. Whatever the motive for crying, the child’s father defined it as purposive and offensive. What the victim intends may be inconsequential. What the offender interprets as intentional, however, may have consequences for the organization of subsequent activity. In sixty percent of the cases, the offender learned the meaning of the victim’s move from inquiries made of victim or audience. In reply, the offender received statements suggesting the victim’s action was insulting and intentional. In thirty-nine percent of the cases, the offender ascertained the meaning of the impropriety directly from the victim: Case 28 As the offender entered the back door of the house his wife said to her lover, the victim, “There’s____.” The victim jumped to his feet and started dressing hurriedly. The offender, having called to his wife without avail, enter the bedroom. He found his wife nude and the victim clad in underwear. The startled offender asked the victim, “Why?” The victim replied, “Haven’t you ever been in love?” We love each other.” The offender later stated, “If they were drunk or something, I could see it. I mean, I’ve done it myself. But when he said they loved each other, well that did it.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

In another twenty-one percent of the cases, however, the offender made his assessment from statements of interested bystanders: Case 20 The offender and his friend were sitting in a booth at a tavern drinking beer. The offender’s friend told him that the offender’s girlfriend was “playing” with another man (victim) at the other end of the bar. The offender looked at them and asked his friend if he thought something was going on. The friend responses, “I wouldn’t let that guy fool around with [her] if she was mine.” The offender agreed, and suggested to his friend that his girlfriend and the victim be shot for their actions. His friend said that only the victim should be shot, not the girlfriend. In the remaining forty percent of the cases the offender imputed meaning to the event on the basis of rehearsals in which the victim had engaged a similar role. The incessant screaming of the infant, the unremitting aggression of a drunken spouse, and the never-ending flirtation by the lover or spouse were activities which offenders had previously encountered and assessed as pointed and deliberate aspersions. Such previous activities and their consequences served the offender as an interpretive scheme for immediately making sense of the present event. Stage III The apparent affront could have evoked different responses. The offender could have excused the violation because the victim was judged to be drunk, crazy, or joking. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

He could have fled the scene and avoided further interaction with the victim by moving into interaction with other occasioned participants or dealt with the impropriety through a retaliatory move aimed at restoring face and demonstrating strong character. The latter move was utilized in all cases. In countering the impropriety, the offender attempted to retore the occasioned order and reaffirm face by standing his or her ground. To have used another alternative was to confirm questions of face and self raised by the victim. The offender’s plight, then, was “problematic” and “consequential.” He could have chosen from several options, each of which had important consequences both to the face he situationally claimed and to his general reputation. Thus, the offender was faced with a dilemma: either deal with the impropriety by demonstrating strength of character, or verify question of face by demonstrating weakness. In retaliating, the offender issues an expression of anger and contempt which signified his opinion of the victim as an unworthy person. Two basic patterns of retaliation were found. In eighty-six percent of the cases, the offender issued a verbal or physical challenge to the victim. In the remaining cases, the offender physically retaliated, killing the victim. For the latter pattern, this third move marked the battle ending the victim’s life: Case 12 The offender, victim, and group of bystanders were observing a fight between a barroom bouncer and a drunk patron on the street outside the tavern. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

The offender was cheering for the bouncer, and the victim was cheering for the patron, who was losing the battle. The victim, angered by the offender’s disposition toward the fight, turned to the offender and said, “You’d really like to see the little guy have the sh*t kicked out of him, wouldn’t you big man?” The offender turned toward the victim and asked, “What did you say? You want the same thing, punk?” The victim moved toward the offender and reared back. The offender responded, “OK buddy.” He struck the victim with a single right cross. The victim crashed to the pavement, and died a week later. Such cases seem to suggest that the event is a one-sided affair, with the unwitting victim engaging a passive, non-contributory role. However, in these cases the third state was preceded by the victim’s impropriety, the offender’s inquiry of the victim or audience, and a response affirming the victim’s intent to be censorious. On assessing the event as one of insult and challenge, the offender elicited a statement indicating to participants, including himself, his intended line of action, secured a weapon, positioned it, and dropped the victim in a single motion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

While ten cases witness the victim’s demise during this stage, the typical case consists of various verbal and physically nonlethal moves. The most common type of retaliation was a verbal challenge, occurring in forty-three present of the cases. These took the form of an ultimatum: either apologize, flee the situation, or discontinue the inappropriate conduct, or face physical harm or death. In about twenty-two percent, retaliation came by way of countering the victim’s impropriety with similar insults or degrading gestures. This response entailed a name-calling, action-matching set of expressions resembling that which would be found between boys in the midst of a playground argument or “playing the dozens.” The remaining cases, some eleven percent of the sample, were evenly divided. On the one hand, offenders issues specific commands, tinged with hostility and backed with an aggressive posture, calling for their victims to back down. On the other hand, offenders “called out” or invited their victims to fight physically. This third stage is the offender’s opening move in salvaging face and honor. In retaliating by verbal and physically nonlethal means, the offender appeared to suggest to the victim a definition of the situation as one in which violence was suitable in settling questions of face and reputation. Another point to take away, is people often think they are being attacked when someone says something offensive to them and that it is okay to respond with physical violence. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

However, the person who first responds with physical violence becomes the offender. So it is often best to walk away. If someone is stalking and harassing you, it is best to contact the police and do not engage in violence because they are baiting you to become the offender and them the victim. If you contact the police and they refuse to take actions and you are feeling threatened, perhaps the next best move would be to contact a lawyer and/or another division of law enforcement to investigate. Just remember, once you physically lay a hand on a person, no matter what they did, you become the offender. And, if someone assaults you, and the responding officer refuse to take action, get the officers name and badge number and contact Internal Affairs. However, keep in mind, it is always best to walk away from an altercation before it becomes physical and never physically attack anyone, nor try to bait them into attacking you.  I have suggested that the behavior of an individua while in a situation is guided by social values or norms concerning involvement. These rulings apply to the intensity of one’s involvements, their distribution among possible main and side activities, and, importantly, their tendency to bring one into an engagement with all, some, or none present. There will be then a patterned distribution or allocation of the individual’s involvement. By taking the point of view of the situation as a whole, we can link the involvement allocation of each participant to that maintained by each of the other participants, piecing together in this way a pattern than can be described as the structure of involvement in the situation. (And just as we speak of actual allocations and structures of involvement, so we can consider matter from the normative point of view and speak of prescribed allocations and structures of involvement.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Since the shape and distribution of involvement nicely enfolds an aspect of everything that goes on within a situation, we can perhaps speak here of the structure of the situation. In any case, if we want to describe conduct on a back ward, or in a street market, a bridge game, an investiture, or a revivalistic church service, it would seem reasonable to employ the structure of involvement in these situations a one frame of reference. Now let us briefly review the kinds of situational proprieties that have been described and the social functions that appear to be performed by them. Rules about access to a bounded region, and the regard that is to be shown its boundaries, are patently rules of respect for the gathering itself. Regulations against unoccasioned main involvements or overtaxing side involvements (especially when either of these represents an auto-involvement) seem to ensure that the individual will not become embroiled divisively in matters that incorporate only oneself; regulations against intense mutual-involvement provide the same assurances about the conduct of a subset of those present. In short, interests that are larger or smaller than the ones sustainable by everyone in the gathering as a whole are curtailed; limits are put of those kinds of emigration of the self which can occur without leaving one’s physical position. Being thus constrained to limit his involvements outside the situation as well as divisive ones within the situation, the individual perforce demonstrates that something of oneself has been reserved for what remains, namely, the little system or regulated social life that is jointly and exclusively maintained by all those in the situation as a whole—the situation being that entity neatly matched the area within which the individual’s regulation of involvement is perceptible. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

However, we know that the gathering and the joint life it currently sustains are merely an expression, a visible phase, of the social occasion within which the situation occurs. To engage in situational impropriety, then, is to draw improperly on what one owes the social occasion. Similar implications emerge when we turn from those constraints that play upon choice of object of involvement to those that pertain to the way in which the individual handles oneself. By sustaining a publicly oriented composition of one’s face and a suitable organization of more material aspects of one’s personal appearance, the individual shows oneself a person ready for social interaction in the situation. By inhibiting creature releases and keeping a check upon intense involvement, one ensures that one will be ready for any event that occurs within the situation, and that one is respectful of these possibilities. By keeping oneself from going too far into a situated task, one is able to remain in readiness near the surface of the situation. Through all of these means, the individual shows that one is “in play” in the situation, alive to the gathering it contains, oriented in it, and ready and open for whatever interaction it may bring. What does it mean to work practically? It means to work not only on intellect but also on emotion and on will. Work on intellect means to think in a new way, creating new points of view, destroying illusions. Work on emotions means not expressing negative emotions, not identifying, not considering, and later on, also work on emotions themselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Work on will: what does it mean? What is will in men nos 1, 2, and 3? It is the resultant of desires. Will is the line of combined desires, and as our desires constantly change, we have no permanent line. So, ordinary will depends on desires, and desires can be very different; desire to do something and desire not to do something. Man has no will but only self-will and willfulness. We have to ask ourselves on what the will of man no. 7 could be based. It must be based on full consciousness, and this implies knowing and understanding connected with objective consciousness and a Permanent “I.” So three things are necessary: knowledge, consciousness, and Permanent “I.” Only those people who have these three things can have real will; that means, a will that is independent of all else and only based on consciousness, knowledge and a Permanent “I.” Now ask yourselves on what self-will and willfulness is based. It is always based on opposition. Self-will is when, for instance, someone sees that a man does not know how to do a thing and says he will explain, and the man says, “No, I will do it myself. “Self-will springs from opposition. Willfulness is much the same only more general. Willfulness can be a kind of habit. In order to study how to begin work on will, how to transform will, one has to give up one’s will. This is a very dangerous expression if it is misunderstood. It is important to understand rightly what “to give up one’s will” means. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

The question is how to give up one’s will. First, one must try to connect and to co-ordinate thoughts which change the whole thing. If we want to be in the work, we must verify all our thoughts, words, and actions from the point of view of work. Some of them can harm the work. So, if you want to work, you are not free any more; you must lose the illusion of freedom. The questions is: Have we freedom? Have we something to lose? The only freedom we have is to do harm to the work and to people. By learning not to harm the work we learn not to harm ourselves; not to perform irresponsible, unconnected actions. So we do not give up anything real. Now, let us look at how the United States of America has used nuclear brinkmanship as an effective deterrent. Now that the cold war is over and the arms race is winding down, we can examine nuclear brinkmanship in a cool analytical way that was hard to achieve earlier. Many argue that there is a paradox in nuclear weapons because they pose too big a threat ever to use. If their use cannot be rational, then the threat cannot be rational either. This is just the Gutman-Spade exchange write large. Without the threat value, nuclear weapons are impotent in deterring minor conflicts. This is why the Europeans feared that NATO’s nuclear umbrella might prove a poor shield against the rain of superior Soviet conventional forces. Even if the United States of America is resolved to defend Europe, the argument went, the threat of nuclear response is not credible against small Soviet transgressions. The Soviets can exploit this using “salami tactics,” a slice at a time. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Imagine that there are riots in West Berlin and some fires. East German fire brigades come to help. Does the U.S.A. president press the nuclear button? Of course not. East German police arrive in support. The button? No. They stay, and a few days later are replaced by East German troops. At each point, the incremental aggression is too small to merit a drastic response. NATO keeps on redrawing the line of its tolerance. Eventually, the Soviets could be at Trafalgar Square, and NATO headquarters in exile would be wondering just when it was that they missed their chance. This conclusion was mistaken. The threat of a U.S.A. nuclear response to conventional Soviet aggression in Europe was one of brinkmanship. There are two ways for getting around the problem of redrawing the line. Brinkmanship uses both. First, you arrange to take the control for punishment out of your hands so as to deny yourself the opportunity to redraw the line. Second, you transform the precipice into a slipper slope. With each step further down the slope there is the risk of losing control and falling into the abyss. In this way, an opponent who tries to avoid your threat through salami tactics finds oneself constantly exposed to a small chance of disaster. Each slice he takes, no matter how small, may be the proverbial last straw. The essential ingredient in making this type of threat credible is that neither you nor your rival knows just where the breaking point lies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

A small risk of disaster can have the same threat value as the certainty of a smaller punishment. The United States of America has used the nuclear threat by creating a risk that the missiles will fly even though at that time the government will be trying as hard as it can to prevent the attack. The United States of America’s threat would be carried out only in spite of itself. The threat of nuclear weaponry is that it will be used inadvertently. Nuclear deterrence becomes credible when there exists the possibility for any conventional conflict to escalate out of control. The threat is not a certainty but rather a probability of mutual destruction. As a conflict escalates, the probability of a chain of events leading to a nuclear confrontation increases. Eventually the probability of war will be sufficiently high that one side will want to back down However, the wheel of war set in motion have a momentum all their own, and the concessions may come too late. Unanticipated, inadvertent, perhaps accidental or irrational actions beyond the leaders’ control will provide the path of escalation to nuclear weapons. M.I.T. political science professor Barry Posen put this well: “Escalation has generally been conceived of as either a rational policy choice, in which the leadership decides to preempt or to escalate in the face of a conventional defeat, or as an accident, the result of a mechanical failure, unauthorized, use, or insanity. But escalation arising out of the normal conduct of intense conventional conflict falls between these two categories: it is neither a purposeful act of policy nor an accident. What might be called “inadvertent escalation” is rather the unintended consequence of a decision to fight a conventional war. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

Nuclear deterrence involves a fundamental trade-off. There is a value in being able to make the threat of mutual destruction. The nuclear age has enjoyed seventy years without a World war. However, there is a cost in leaving our fate to chance. Nuclear deterrence requires accepting some risk of mutual destruction. Much of the debate about nuclear deterrence centers on this risk. What can we do to lower the probability of nuclear war without losing the value of deterrence? The trick, as usual, is to keep such generalized risk within the bounds of effectiveness and acceptability. Successful brinkmanship remains something of an art and an adventure. When it comes to swapping secrets, all “companies” are part of a massive information marketplace. Part of any industrial economy consists of sales of goods or services, not to “end consumers” but from one business to another. In the same way, spies have long traded with one another. Edward Gleichen, a British spy at the turn of the 20^th century, surveyed Moroccan fortifications, sometime with the good-natured help of local populations who, he reported, “assisted me in ‘shooting’ angels and slopes.” This intelligence was later handed over to the French, who were busy “pacifying the natives.” What the British received in exchange is not recorded, but this kind of truck and barter, as Adam Smith might have termed it, is not only rampant behind the scenes, but growing. RandolphHarris 17 of 23

Much like today’s global corporations, spy agencies are linked in consortia and alliance. Ever since 1947, a secret pact known as the UKUSA Security Agreement has linked the NSA, the British GCHQ, and their Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand counterparts. Later, the NATO organization joined the pact. (Since 1986, however, New Zealand has been excluded from the intelligence-sharing arrangement because it prohibited nuclear-armed American vessels from entering its ports.) Members of such consortia maintain uneasy links, sharing information and misinformation, accusing one another of leaking secrets or having been penetrated by an adversary, or of holding out some secrets. The modern World’s second great intelligence consortium, from the end of World War II until the 1990s, was, of course, controlled from Moscow and included most of the East European nations plus Cuba and North Vietnam. One case that illustrates their relationships involved James D. Harper, a retired electrical engineer in California whose wife worked for Systems Control, a U.S.A. defense contractor. For $250,000, Harper sold a large number of Systems Control documents to Zdzislaw Przychodzien, supposedly an employee of the polish Ministry of Machine Industry, but actually an agent of the Polish SB, the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa. The papers, dealing with U.S.A. ballistic missile defenses, were quickly shipped to Warsaw, sorted, copied, and then picked up by case officers of the Soviet KGB. The KGB is said to have routinely “tasked” the satellite services with specific assignments. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

The Harper story was repeated many times with the agencies of East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania when Eastern Europe was under Soviet domination. While all these countries also pursued their own perceived self-interests, they were so organically linked to the Soviets, they even continued collaborating with the Soviets for a time after the overthrow of their communists governments. However, not everyone was a member of the two big intelligence camps. Nor did trade only with one another. Many other buyer-seller relationships exist. In many nations when a new regime or different party tasks over the government, one of its most important decisions (never discussed publicly) is the choice of an “intelligence vendor” or “wholesaler.” A good example was the case of President Raul Alfonsin, who headed the first democratic government of Argentina after the military junta fell. In 1985 insiders in his civilian government were debating the problem. The main suppliers that Argentina could hook up with were the CIA, the French, the British, or the Israeli Mossad. Under the deal, Argentina’s spies would feed its supplier with information about certain countries, in return for a steam of information about countries that Argentinian intelligence could not afford to cover or could not penetrate. The British were out, because of the then still-fresh Falklands/Malvinas war, which pitted them against the Argentinians. The CIA? It had has relations with the previous regime in Buenos Aires, and anyway it might be best to avoid both the superpowers. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The French were a possibility, but while strong in Africa, they were weak on the ground in South America, where, after all, Argentina’s min interests lie. “Alas,” said one Argentine official, “the problem is that in intelligence matters, one never knows with whom one is dealing.” Similar questions are, no doubt, being debated in all the Eastern European nations that have loosened their ties with Moscow and are even now searching for new spy-partnerships in Western Europe and elsewhere. Even in the United States of America, intelligence-sharing practices change with the arrival of a new administration. South Africa, lacking satellites of its own, has received intelligence about neighboring black nations from both the United States of America and the British. This included information about the African National Congress, the main black opposition movement in South Africa. President Jimmy Carter banned any exchange of U.S.A. intelligence were every opened, all sorts of odd cross-linkages would turn up. The Australians working in Chile under CIA  direction to overthrow the Allende government. The French working with the Portuguese and the Moroccans, for example, or the Romanians with the PLO. The Soviets have collected information about Israeli air and sea operations and have passed it on to Libya. This Israelis supply information to the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Perhaps the most astonishing cross-linkage of all is implied in the 1989 visit of two former top KGB officials—Deputy Director Fiodor Sherbak and Valentin Zvezdenkov, chief of KGB antiterrorist operations—to the United States of America, where they met with former CIA Director William Colby and current officials to work out an information-sharing agreement with respect to narcotics and terrorism. Such secret criss-cross arrangements make it possible for one nation to hide behind another and to do things that its own laws might declare illegal or questionable. The GCHQ, for example, maintains a list of Americans whose phone calls interest the NSA. The international swapping of secrets subverts all domestic restrictions on intelligence gather. When speaking of cooperative controls, molecular manufacturing will lead to more powerful technologies, but our current, crude technology already has World-smashing potential. We have lived with that potential for decades now. In the coming years, we will need to strengthen institutions for maintaining peaceful security. If most of the political power in the World, and with it most of the police and military power, sees that the course of self-interest lies in peace and stability, then solutions seem possible. (The prospect of an arms race in nanotechnology is terrifying and to be avoided at almost any cost. As of this writing, the end of the Cold War offers a better hope of avoiding this nightmare.) #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

James C. Bennett, a high-tech entrepreneur and public-policy commentator affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Issues in Technology, explains the goal: “Advanced technologies, particularly as far-ranging a capability as nanotechnology, will create a strong demand for their regulation. The challenge will be to create sufficient controls to prevent the power-hungry from abusing the technologies, without either smothering development or creating an overbearing international regime.” In the coming decades, preventing major abuse of nanotechnology will take the form of regulation, arms control, and antiterrorist activities. In the field of arms control, nanotechnology should present strong motivation for international cooperation and for intimate mutual inspection in the form of joint-research programs. The sheer productive capabilities of molecular manufacturing will make it possible to move from working prototype to mass production in a matter of days. In a more exotic vein, dangerous nanomachines could be developed, including programmable “germs” (replicating or nonreplicating) for germ warfare. Either development could bring war. With peace looking so profitable and an arms race looking so dangerous, arms control through cooperative development should look attractive. This does not make it easy, or likely. Terrorism is not an immediate concern. We have lived with nuclear weapons and nerve gas for decades now, and nerve gas, at least, is not difficult to make. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

As of this writing, no city has been obliterated by terrorists using these means, and no terrorist has ever made a credible threat of this sort. The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like the Kurds in Iraq, fell victim to nuclear and chemical weapons wielded by governments, not small groups. So long as nanotechnology is technically more challenging than the simple chemistry of nerve gas, nanoterrorism should not be a primary concern. To keep dangerous nanotechologies unavailable, however, will require regulation. If anyone were free to build anything using molecular manufacturing, then someday as the technology base improves and designs become available for more and more nanodevices, someone, somewhere—if only out of sheer spite—would figure out how to combine those nanodevices to make a dangerous replicator and turn it loose. There will almost surely be warning signs, however: In the natural course of events, causes attract protesters before stone-throwers, and produce letter bombs before car bombs. Abuse of nanotechnology is likely to be visible long before it is devastating, and this at least gives some time to try to respond. We should still keep a reasonable hope that our moral responsibility may gain control over the primeval drive, but our only hope of its ever doing so rests on the humble recognition of the fact that militant enthusiasm is an instinctive response with a phylogenetically determined releasing mechanism and the only point at which intelligent and responsible supervision can get control in the conditioning of the scrutiny of the categorical question. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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