1. Furthermore, some experts regard some of these weapons as a new stage in the balance of terror.

2. Notwithstanding the end of the cold war balance of terror, stocks of such weapons remain extraordinarily and alarmingly high: some 27,000 in the case of nuclear weapons, of which around 12,000 are still actively deployed.

3. As John Hickey writes in Religion and the Northern Ireland Problem: “It is possible now . . . to accept danger or death as a consequence simply of being a Roman Catholic or a Protestant; to accept savage retaliation —sectarian murders— as the way of keeping Northern Ireland’s particular version of the ‘balance of terror.’”