The cover of the Economist news paper pictures President Bill Clinton tiptoeing along the nuclear-armed border between India and Pakistan. The lead editorial terms this real estate the world’s most dangerous place, citing the squabble between nuclear-tipped India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Would that they were right.

Danger does sometimes overtake us from such trouble spots. But more often, it creeps into our life unawares. While the world’s newspapers worry aloud about this border bully and that budding new terrorist, the real danger ticks away—not in the places we watch, but in the places we never think to look. The public school classroom. The medical research laboratory. In the minds of six-year-old killers. The real danger is not that which lurks outside of us. The real danger lives within us.

At the end of World War II, it was General Omar Bradley, addressing an Armistice Day crowd, who said: "We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. … The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants."

Some estimates place the Human Genome project within fifteen months of completion. This is the foundation upon which we as human beings will begin tinkering with the human species.

Through eugenics, the Nazis sought to craft the master race that would rule the world for a thousand years. They were limited to enticing blond-hair, blue-eyed boys and girls to do what comes naturally—make love.

Our sterile, gene-snipping and splicing approaches suffer from no such limitation. You want your child to be smarter? No problem, Mom and Dad; tweaking here gives us a bigger brain. Athletics is your passion? Our genetically modified offspring are guaranteed to take the Little League like storm troopers. Would you like to experiment with longevity? Just consult our price list to build your designer baby.

Civilization once viewed mankind as God’s creation. As such, His handiwork was due reverence and respect. The technological elite nurtured in the primordial, evolutionary swamp, who have long since declared God dead and named themselves His replacements, labor under no such humble illusions. A relativistic worldview has equipped them with situational ethics suitable for every challenge. Right and wrong that turns on a dime. Brilliance without conscience.

Our nation’s military is under a solemn obligation to protect us. Given this tasking, we can hardly expect the military and defense establishment to remain silent on the new technology. The world is a dangerous place; with the right modifications, we can engineer the perfect fighting man and woman. Enhance the brain; increase the muscle mass in the arms and legs. Quick reactions with no qualms about carrying out orders. The other side is doing it, you understand. We must remain competitive.

There’s also the corporate battlefield. "People are our most important asset," or so the phrase goes. Why not then encourage future mommies and daddies already working in the company to tweak this gene and splice that one? Smart is good. The right "look" is important to assure your offspring of a top-rated job. It’s all covered in your corporate health plan.

The genie now roaming the halls of science will not use the words that I have used to describe our destiny under his lordship; instead, he will speak of diseases and deformities forever decimated, of lives worth living and those that are not. And if we are still skeptical, he will tell us that we must do it for the children. Would we deprive them of paradise on earth, a Garden of Eden in every town square?

The world’s most dangerous place is the human heart.

Cruise missiles are about to get a whole lot scarier. Existing flying bombs are told exactly where to go. But the U.S. Air Force is now developing a cheap cruise missile that chooses its own targets. Once launched, the cruise missile will patrol the skies and hunt down armored vehicles, tanks, surface-to-air missile batteries and even Scud missiles. It will even be smart enough to take evasive action when attempts are made to shoot it down.

The idea, says Ken Edwards, project director at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Eglin, Florida, is to send the low-cost autonomous attack system (LOCAAS) missiles into areas where military intelligence has little information on targets. They will be dropped in bunches of four by aircraft. The missiles, which are powered by a small turbojet engine, will then head to the target area and initiate a search pattern.

Naturally, there are bound to be fears about having such destructive weapons flying around with no one controlling them or choosing the targets. After all, in the Kosovo conflict, even NATO pilots were sometimes unable to distinguish between tanks and fleeing refugees.

In the months since Vladimir V. Putin became acting president of Russia, the world has barely begun getting to know him. But already, he is building a clear record in one area of policy. Little noticed by the West, Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB, is rapidly remilitarizing Russian society.

Visitors to the old Soviet Union used to be surprised at the sheer number of people in uniform in the streets. At 18, men were conscripted for two years of mandatory military service. Virtually everyone who had graduated from a technical, medical or foreign-languages college was considered an officer of the reserves and required to report for regular training exercises.

Young schoolchildren had to take part in bomb drills and survival games, complete with toy guns for boys and nurse training for girls. Starting at 14, students learned warfare in a mandatory class called primary military preparation; one activity was taking apart and cleaning the famous Kalashnikov rifle. All men and many women were required to carry military cards, and the all-important internal passport also indicated military status.

In the 1990s the number of people in the services dwindled as budgets were cut and opportunities increased in the private sector. But like other Soviet legacies, the institutionalized military nature of Russian society remained ready to be resurrected. Since Putin took office on Dec. 31, he has issued 11 presidential decrees. Six concerned the military.

One decree re-established mandatory training exercises for reservists. Putin has also re-established military training in secondary schools. Russian teenagers will once again become intimate with the Kalashnikov.

The Ministry of Education’s plans to expand the school curriculum to 12 years will also have a military impact. Boys will graduate from high school not at 17, as now, but at the conscription age of 18, and will not have time to try to gain acceptance to colleges that could grant draft exemptions. As for alternative service, Russians can forget about it: The first young man who went to court to claim this right in the Putin era was jailed for avoiding the draft.

The government’s latest resolution: From now on, military detachments will be encouraged to "adopt" boys 14 and older who are orphaned or have single mothers.

(Masha Gessen is chief correspondent at the Russian news weekly Itogi.)

The United Nations' top humanitarian official in Baghdad says infant mortality in Iraq has more than doubled under the UN embargo imposed in 1990. Hans von Sponeck, who announced his resignation, saying UN humanitarian programs in Iraq were ineffective, added that one Iraqi child in five now suffered from malnutrition. "We have evidence that mental disorders of children under 14 are increasing. So there is a sense of hopelessness, and can we afford, can anyone afford, to associate himself or herself with such a reality? I cannot."

The United Nations estimates that more than a million Iraqis have died, directly or indirectly because of the sanctions. Von Sponeck's predecessor, Denis Halliday of Ireland, left his post in mid-1998 after voicing similar views.

If Albert Einstein is the "Person of the 20th Century," as the editors of Time magazine believe, his thinking went well beyond relativity, photons, subatomic particles and quarks.

Science was Einstein's livelihood; pacifism was his life. It is odd that despite the ardency of Einstein's political and spiritual commitment to pacifism, the editors of Time, in their December cover story about him, devote 1,425 lines to his scientific ideas but only three to his views on nonviolence.

Einstein spoke and wrote passionately against the evils of the military mentality, whether exhibited in a government's forcing the young to join armies or in its stockpiling weapons to annihilate the next enemy. "Our schoolbooks glorify war and conceal its horrors," Einstein wrote. "They indoctrinate children with hatred. I would teach peace rather than war, love rather than hate."

Einstein lived in America from 1933 until his death in 1955. That was time enough to analyze and constructively criticize the country's "imperialist and militaristic interests."

In the early 1950s, when the U.S. arms industry commenced its weapons-building spree that lasts to this day, and when Congress began an equally long-lasting buying spree to pay for it, Einstein argued: "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war."

Einstein became a one-man counselor for draft resisters. In a December 1930 speech in New York, he said: "I should like you to realize that under the present military system, every man is compelled to commit the crime of killing for his country. The timid may say, 'What is the use [of resisting]? We shall be sent to prison.' To them I would reply: Even if only 2 percent of those assigned to perform military service would announce their refusal to fight, as well as urge means other than war of settling international disputes, governments would be powerless; they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail."

Einstein's work on atomic energy exposed him to the criticism that he was aligned with the military mentality and its insatiable lust for lethally greater weapons. In fact, he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt in early 1945 urging him not to use atomic weapons against Japan. The day Roosevelt died, the letter was found on his desk unopened.

After Harry Truman incinerated the citizens of Hiroshima, Einstein said, "If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker."

For Einstein, security did not come from a nation's ability to send its young to kill the people of another land. "Men should continue to fight," he said, "but they should fight for things worthwhile, not for imaginary geographical lines, racial prejudices and private greed draped in the colors of patriotism. Their arms should be weapons of the spirit, not shrapnel and tanks."

China urged the world to accept its goal of absorbing Taiwan along the lines of its unification with Hong Kong and Macau--or else risk consequences "you don't want to see."

Speaking at a conference in Munich, Germany, Wang Guangya, Beijing's Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, said it would be wrong for the United States to encourage recalcitrance among leaders in Taiwan by promising military support.

"Sending the wrong messages to the leaders in Taiwan might lead to a result you don't want to see," Wang added, without elaborating.

China has warned that the risk of war with Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province, has risen after the U.S. House of Representatives supported legislation to provide more military training and support to Taipei.

Wang's comments highlighted the risks to international stability which have grown in Asia. Relations between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, remain tense after recent fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, has become a powder keg. North Korea is seen by the United States as posing a potential threat of nuclear blackmail as it seeks to develop a ballistic missile system.