Adelson's call for the potential mass annihilation of Iranians may have struck some in the U.S. as less than helpful, but he's got counterparts in the fringe of Iran.
The New York Times suggests that Erdogan's true desires are to supplant Ataturk, the country's leader who both modernized and "Turkified" the country after the 1915 mass annihilation of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks and finalized the elimination of the remaining Armenians.
We may not have this good a chance of ridding the world of these instruments of mass annihilation for another generation.
In The Killing Compartments, Abram De Swaan, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, provides an insightful analysis of the phenomenon of mass annihilation that is not directly a part of "regular warfare".
Whether it's global terrorism or pandemic disease, dramatic climate change or the proliferation of weapons of mass annihilation, the threats we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries".
He concluded: "Instead of investing in weapons of mass annihilation, governments must allocate resources towards meeting human needs".
(The sense of mortality in "The Twilight Zone" was the prospect of mass annihilation — We're all gonna die!) It tries to cheat the big sleep by prying open so many doors into the beyond.
Despite various self-serving alliances, Wagner was an anarchist at heart, hostile to most modern manifestations of the state; in his last years, he preached against militarism and fearfully predicted future wars of mass annihilation.
The overwhelming probability now (well demonstrated by a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report last week) is that there was no threat, no WMD worth that name, no pending programmes of mass annihilation.
The UN Convention on Genocide, agreed in 1948, offers a range of actions (killing, harming, imposing harsh conditions, restricting birth, forcible adoption) which are genocidal if committed with intent to "destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".As an attempt to ring-fence a particular category of mass annihilation, this presents huge problems.
IN the final minutes of the movie "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," with a nuclear conflagration on the horizon, the only person in the Pentagon's war room who remains upbeat about the prospect of mass annihilation is Strangelove himself.
