There is surely no more obvious symptom of the corruption of western politics than the disproportionbetween the money available for sustaining life and the money available for terminating it. We could, I think,expect that, if they were asked to vote on the matter, most of the citizens of the rich world would demandthat their governments spend as much on humanitarian aid as they spend on developing new means of killingpeople. But the military-industrial complex is a beast which becomes both fiercer and greedier the more it isfed.