When I last fought, my troops battled the enemy with rifle, machine gun and grenade. They were supported by guns, mortars, tanks, planes and ships. Apart from adjusting to a few innovations, such as helicopters, a second-world-war company commander would not have felt out of place in the Falklands in 1982.

The next world war, according to James Adams, will out-Spielberg Spielberg. Soldiers will send wasp-sized robots to gas sentries at missile sites already reconnoitred by 4 inch-long, hand-launched, micro-aircraft powered by tiny whisper jets. Patrol commanders will communicate with headquarters by e-mail, using a wrist keyboard and screen. Aggression by, say, China, could be halted, thanks to previously implanted sensors and microchips in key computer-controlled systems.

Using WBOM (War By Other Means) the American president will be able to close down the telephone network in China and trigger drought in the Yangtze flood plain--all from a PC in Washington.

The name of the game is Information Warfare (IW): first, discovering what your opponent is up to; second, destroying his information-dependent systems; third, targeting his information resources. The motion and gunnery systems in Abrams tanks rely on 50 interdependent microprocessors. Disrupt their ability to communicate with each other, and the tank is junk.

Among the myriad technological gizmos that make Adams' predictions possible are Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (Mems). They trigger the airbags in our cars, and the latest versions are the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Scientists in Albuquerque have already made robots the size of sugar cubes, and that is just the beginning. The possibilities are endless and America is a leader in the field.

So all is well, the baddies will be made offers they can't refuse, or zapped at no cost in lives. We can all relax and go holidaying in Tuscany, or whatever takes our fancy.

Not so, says Adams. In the IW game, the better you are at attack the more vulnerable you are to attack--like the Abrams tank. Technology can get into the "wrong" hands, terrorists, for example. Hackers can spoil your day. In other words, the enemy thinks, too.

Even identifying the "enemy" will be difficult if with a few keystrokes on a computer in Hong Kong, connected by modem and land-line to a remote satellite dish, someone can detonate bombs planted in Washington. How does the US strike back, and at whom? Lacking perception and will despite its power, America is, according to Adams, a Goliath waiting to be hacked down by a ruthless David.

Five women and 25 girls and boys living in a barn sobbed with hunger and one woman said winter might kill them if the world ignores the plight of Kosovo refugees. The women and children, from two large Kosovar clans, looked up blankly when a reporter peered through the door to find them sitting in a tight semi-circle next to a small heap of blankets and hay where they sleep.

Hatmane Vishaj, 78, a family matriarch, struggled to her feet to say no one else had visited them since they fled their burning village weeks ago and moved into the barn on the western edge of this southern Serbian province.

"We have almost nothing to eat or drink. We have nothing to sustain the children with. Winter is coming and we fear we are going to die. We are terribly afraid, especially on account of the children," she said, her voice quavering.

The women and children, and many thousands like them, are marooned in backwoods seldom if ever visited by aid agencies. They are refugees from a Serbian offensive against ethnic Albanian separatists that has driven an estimated 10 percent of Kosovo's two million people, 90 percent of them ethnic Albanians, from their homes and farms. And the nights are already turning cooler and wetter--harbinger of the long, freezing and snowbound Balkan winter.

"How can great countries leave us to our fate?" Vishaj said.

"Where is Europe? Don't they know about us? Why don't they deal with Slobodan Milosevic they way they did with Saddam Hussein?" cried Mehmetaj Ali, the father of eight in the barn.

This may be as good a time as any for a tour d'horizon of American hypocrisy about weapons around the world. During the Cold War, we became accustomed to the fact that America got in bed with what seemed to be every fascist kleptocrat on Earth. We were perennially arming monstrous dictators and backing tyrants who abused and stole from their own people.

All this was justified in the name of the great Realpolitik of stopping communism. Those of us who objected to arming nun-rapers and bishop-killers were patted on the head and told, tut-tut, it was all being done in the name of democracy, and the only dictator we needed to be upset about was Fidel Castro.

The Cold War has been over for almost nine years now. Some of the old dictators have died of natural causes: Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most remarkable thieves we ever helped keep in power, is gone at last after three decades of raping his country.

But here we are with our knickers in a twist because India and Pakistan have just "joined the nuclear club" (such a curious euphemism). And who do you think helped get them there? We did, with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms sales. And now we're all concerned that India and Pakistan will go to war.

Ditto Cyprus, where peace talks are unraveling and the United States scrambles to sell jet fighters, tanks and missiles to both Turkey and Greece. Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Central Asia, you name it--if there's a trouble spot in the world, we're busily profiting by selling arms to all sides.

According to Luke Warren of the Council for a Livable World, since the Cold War, the United States has become the world's largest arms dealer, selling, on average, $16.6 billion per year since 1991. And mind you, this trade is supported by taxpayer subsidies; last year, U.S. taxpayers provided $7.8 billion in corporate welfare to arms manufacturers to sell overseas.

William Hartung, an authority on global arms sales with the World Policy Institute and author of "And Weapons for All," has documented the presence of U.S.-supplied weapons in 39 of the world's 42 ongoing ethnic and territorial conflicts.

For 50 years, sustained by the cold war, "security" has been defined primarily in military terms. Backed by doomsday nuclear arsenals, the cold war adversaries were locked in mortal competition.

But now that the cold war has faded away, a very different struggle for survival is emerging. After the slaying of the cold war dragon, James Woolsey, former head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, compared the future to living in a jungle inhabited by a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. There has been a shift from war between sovereign states to fighting within societies.

Since the end of World War II, there have been at least 130 wars, killing more than 23 million people directly and another 20 million through famine and other war-related disruptions. Whereas the number of major wars--killing at least 1,000 persons--stood at around a dozen in any given year during the fifties, and rose no higher than 20 a year during the sixties and seventies, it surged at the beginning of the eighties to more than 30, where it has remained ever since.

And as many countries may be bordering on war as are actually engaged in it. The post-cold war era is increasingly witnessing a phenomenon of what some have called "failed states"--the implosion of countries like Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and others. Several other countries are among the ranks of what Professor James Rosenau of George Washington University calls "adrift nation-states"--countries that "have lost their moorings and may well be moving toward the edge of failure."

The outbreak of civil wars and the collapse of entire societies is being ascribed to the resurfacing of "ancient ethnic hatreds" revolving around seemingly irreconcilable religious and cultural differences. Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University went so far as to postulate a coming "clash of civilizations"--ethnically motivated communal violence. Some 40 percent of all countries have populations from five or more different "nations." Roughly half of the world's countries have experienced some kind of interethnic strife in recent years.

Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia have shown that the abundance and easy availability of arms can turn social and political upheaval into a violent disintegration of entire countries, triggering devastation on a massive scale. Although the public impression of the Rwandan conflict, for example, is mainly one of machete-wielding individuals on a rampage, the killing was in fact also conducted with machine guns, grenades, mortars, and land mines purchased from France, Egypt, South Africa, and another dozen or so arms suppliers that rushed in "like vultures to a carcass," as Stephen Goose and Frank Smyth of the Human Rights Watch Arms Project wrote in Foreign Affairs.

The twentieth century has seen the pursuit of "national security" elevated to near theological levels; modern military technology has dramatically increased the destructive power of weaponry, the range and speed of delivery vehicles, and the sophistication of targeting technologies. Yet arms ostensibly designed to enhance security increasingly imperil humanity's survival. We live in what is the most violent time in human history: the twentieth century accounts for 75 percent of all war deaths inflicted since the rise of the Roman Empire

Burns, Wyo. -- Awesome nuclear power still sleeps below the Great Plains in mid-America. Many of the weapons, and their keepers, still remain on watch.

It is easy to forget that the U.S. military still spends about $28 billion a year to keep about 7,500 nuclear warheads ready for use. This is roughly the equivalent of 145,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Bologoye, Russia -- Deep below ground in a hardened nuclear-command bunker, Cmdr. Alexander Kapryushkin of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces has his finger on Russia's nuclear button.

The days of Cold War confrontation are over, but down in the bunker, 34-year-old Kapryushkin still sees America as Russia's enemy. "We can clearly see that the imperialist world, led by the United States, is rapidly advancing toward us," he says with conviction. "Their goal is to destroy our state."

Russia's estimated 6,000 nuclear warheads are no longer aimed at the United States, but they are capable of being re-targeted in a few minutes. An SS-25 missile of the type that Kapryushkin controls from his bunker at the Bologoye rocket base north of Moscow can obliterate an American city just ten minutes after launch. And the ability to launch the missiles lies literally at the fingertips of low-level officers like Kapryushkin. There's no fail-safe system to prevent an accidental launch or keep a rogue commander from triggering nuclear Armageddon.