One of the greatest paradoxes of the modern era is the relationship between science and rationalism. Whether it was the Age of Rationalism that ushered in the great scientific revolution or vice versa, there is clearly a powerful link between the manner in which most of us view the world today and the enormous strides made by the natural scientists both in theoretical explanations of reality and in applications of these theories to everyday life.

But the great hope of the nineteenth century--that the Age of Improvement would catapult the world, led by clear-minded scientists and progressive, rational politicians, to a utopia of physical and spiritual well-being--met with cruel and brutal disillusionment in the first part of the twentieth century. Moreover, it was precisely those scientists who had been the banner-carriers of such hopes who ended up serving the cause of destruction, whether in the name of accelerating change to inhuman velocities or in the service of turning the wheel back to a mythical, idyllic past. Simultaneously, other scientists engaged in producing the instruments that ultimately destroyed the totalitarian regimes armed and legitimized by their erstwhile colleagues.

Yet rather than serving as an example of the ultimate good to which science can be put, the collective scientific mind that had thwarted the onslaught of Nazism and its collection of "wonder weapons" discovered to its horror that it had produced true weapons of mass destruction. And, as has always been the case, once made available, the tools that were capable of annihilating the entire universe were employed. Looking at this development from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, after the end of the cold war and the emergence of international terrorism on a hitherto unimaginable scale, we can say that weapons of mass destruction can indeed end up in the hands of those who are the sworn enemies of everything that is modern, rational and scientific.

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