As we stand on the threshold of the new year, the quest for universal peace seems as unrealizable as ever.

North Korea’s nuclear program and Iran’s refusal to stop enriching uranium – potentially to manufacture nuclear weapons – highlights the fact that the world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era. Most alarmingly, the likelihood that fanatical terrorists will get their hands on nuclear weaponry is increasing.

When Robert Hutchins supervised the development of the atomic bomb at the University of Chicago 67 years ago, he called it “the good news of damnation,” contending that it would frighten people into banding together to avoid world suicide and achieve world peace.

Now, years later, we can see he was as wrong as Alfred Nobel, a half-century earlier, who predicted that his invention of dynamite would make war so horrible that men would voluntarily give it up.

Nuclear warfare has made effective defence impossible; only retaliation remains as a threat. And even that is dubious: enemy submarines can lob nuclear bombs upon our coastal cities and submerge them into the sea. Who could identify the enemy in such a covert and undeclared war? One that could be over, for all practical purposes, in 20 minutes.

Our most perilous cultural lag is equating modern warfare with wars of the past, when today it is not only quantitatively but also qualitatively a different paradigm. We are confronting an entirely unique situation in the history of mankind, and either warfare must be abolished or we will be.

Young Canadian men and women are dying in faraway places. They face terrorists who are determined, resolute and implacable, heroes to themselves willing to die to vindicate their cause. They can be killed, but there is no way to extinguish their grievances or hostility.

 In his recent book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges, a bitter critic of his country’s foreign policy, warns his fellow Americans about the costs of warfare. “We embrace the dangerous delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to impose our virtues – which we see as superior to all other virtues – on others, and that we have a right to do this by force. The wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan are doomed to futility. We cannot afford them. The rash of home foreclosures, the mounting job losses, the collapse of banks and the financial services industry, the poverty ripping apart the working classes, our crumbling infrastructure, and the killing of Afghan and Iraqi civilians by our iron fragmentation bombs converge. The costly forms of death we dispense on one side of the globe are hollowing us out from the inside at home.”

Others, of course, disagree and are certain that the terrorist threat must be eliminated if the world is to ever enjoy security.

War is waged for many different reasons. At best, it should be engaged in with regret, an admission that nothing else will do, that we have failed in reason and reconciliation. To proclaim a war as “holy” is the ultimate depth of blasphemy. Ultimately, all war is unholy desecrating what it proclaims to defend.

The late diplomat and politician David Ormsby-Gore lamented: “It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol heap.