Terrorism [ter-uh-riz-uh m] noun 1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.

“The aim of Rapid Dominance is to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fit or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.” – Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, Defense Group Inc. for The National Defense University

Sixteen hours after an American plane dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, which lead to the eventual deaths of nearly 130,000 people, President Truman proudly announced the achievements of the United States in employing 126,000 Americans in the creation of such technology, “What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”

“What if they used all those people and effort for something else? For something better?” a friend said to me recently after reading a report from the New York Times journalist William L. Laurence who flew on the second mission in the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing 60-70,000 people, and had this to say, “It is a thing of beauty to behold, this ‘gadget.’ Into its design went millions of man-hours of what is without doubt the most concentrated intellectual effort in history.”