Empire No More : The Lion and Wolf Shall Cease

Wars and threats of war seethe all around us. The end of the Cold War, far from bringing a new era of universal peace, gave place to a frenzied new drive to build more powerful and deadly weapons, and a permanent Orwellian 'war on terror' which is self-renewing, and, it is to be feared, unwinnable. American military doctrine has been transmuted into a formal commitment to 'Full Spectrum Dominance,' or unchallengeable superiority in any contest on or in land, sea, air, space or information. Old treaties for disarmament have gone down like skittles. There follows a deadly competition to perfect usable nuclear weapons and to repudiate the 'no first use' pledges which were once thought to offer a slender link to rationality and human survival. If the peace is endangered, human rights are in parlous condition. The United Nations finds itself widely ignored, and overruled by brute force. The Geneva Conventions are not only violated, but the complaints of the Red Cross are not even read by responsible ministers. In the final paroxysms of the old East-West arms race, Ken Coates was a founder of European Nuclear Disarmament, which tried to take both peace and human rights seriously. Full Spectrum Dominance make this commitment more difficult, and more necessary, than ever.Coates, Ken is the author of 'Empire No More : The Lion and Wolf Shall Cease', published 2004 under ISBN 9780851247007 and ISBN 0851247008.