PREFACE
AC T ION FOR DIS A RM A MENT: 10 T H INGS YOU C A N DO
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 was a watershed for the technological advancement of modern weapons. Never before was a major war fought with weapons forged from the industrial revolution. There was the machine gun, as well as artillery capable of firing exploding shells from several miles away. Landmines were planted in the fields. There were armoured tanks, battleships, and even submarines firing torpedoes. From above, warplanes were dropping bombs. As a harbinger of things to come, mustard gas was also released as a chemical weapon. For four years, there was an average of five and a half thousand casualties per day. In the end, 10 million people died and 30 million were wounded, maimed, disfigured, and incapacitated for the rest of their lives. The world had changed: mankind had the technical means to mass-produce destruction. World War II continued that trend—now widening the annihilation to civilian populations. This war also saw the birth of the nuclear age with the emergence of nuclear weapons. The mere existence of nuclear weapons—which can wipe out civilizations, even life on earth—has changed our world forever. In the decades after World War II, the Cold War between the major powers sometimes led to proxy wars in other parts of the world. The two largest nuclear-weapon States, the United States and the Soviet Union, provided conventional arms to countries who then fought wars sometimes for independence and sometimes for ideological reasons, which resulted in millions of casualties. After 1990, when the Cold War ended, the number of conflicts went down, and their character changed. Inter-State warfare (soldiers from different countries fighting each other) had been largely replaced by ethnic and religious strife, with armed groups mixing economic and political objectives, mainly using small arms and light weapons. All too often those handling guns
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