What exactly are “Weapons of Mass Destruction”?
The term, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), is vague and subject to the Sorites paradox. We would, no doubt, all agree that “600 megatons (600,000,000 tons of TNT)”, would qualify as WMDs. That is the amount the USA has ready to go to defend our country according to the article, “Overkill is Not Dead”, published March 15, 1998 in the New York Times Magazine (online version at http://www.ithaca.edu/politics/gagnon/hall.htm). Of course, one megaton less would still be a WMD — and so on down to a rifle bullet! Unless my logic is faulty, we must conclude that all countries harbor WMDs, the USA just harboring the most. • Public Access to Government Held Information How much should the public be allowed to know about what is going on in the government? Access appears to be purely arbitrary and subject to change with time. The Freedom Of Information Act was only passed about 40 years ago and is subject to cancellation in part or whole at any time! The security classification of documents (T
