Do we really need to borrow old words from dead Italians to describe our proud wish to stand alone eating pizza on a floating American weapons platform?
For all the weapons floating through "Soul Circus" -- in one scene, Mr. Pelecanos simply describes how a criminal drives a young woman with no prior convictions to Maryland and has her buy him a gun, because she can pass the legally required background check -- this is not a book built on violence.
Lavrov played down the Cyrillic lettering found on some rocket fragments, saying, "You know, this region has so many weapons floating around, both from Soviet times and from more recent times".
The Guardian has reported how private security companies protecting ships against Somali pirates store their weapons on floating armouries in international waters to avoid arms smuggling laws.
"I think we should bear in mind that no-one has a really credible number of how many illegal weapons there are floating around the UK," he says.
However, as a weapon of terror, floating, creeping death is hard to beat.
Even without Russia's newest weapons delivery, there are plenty of guns floating around the Fergana valley, and there are plenty of men in uniform who will choose ethnic loyalties over legalistic abstractions.
Since ancient times, war at sea had been fought much like that on land: with melee weapons and bows and arrows, but on floating wooden platforms rather than battlefields.
Nevertheless, floating, creeping death is hard to beat as a weapon of terror.
If Syria disintegrates into another Afghanistan — on Israel's border — it would be an untamed land, with jihadists, chemical weapons and surface-to-air missiles all freely floating about.
Any half-baked terrorist who had access to weapons-grade plutonium – and there might be enough floating around the former Soviet Union to furnish 20 000 A bombs 8– could plant dirty bombs in 20 mega-cities (these bombs would be very difficult to detect if encased in lead) and sequentially detonate them.
