text: The twentieth century has seen more wars than any other previous bloc of time.  Though advances in communication, transportation, and information sharing, the world as a body of people living in close proximity, has rapidly shrunk.  In the second of the world wars, the race was on to create the most devastating, most powerful, and most frightening weapon our people had ever known.  In my opinion, the discovery and harness of atom and its energy and the corresponding invention of nuclear weapons have been the most significant factors of change in our lifetime, if not, perhaps, in several lifetimes.
  	As missile technology and nuclear fusion capacities increased and improved, fear began to replace nationalism, and our small world erected barriers between its members.  From my experience as an American, I can remember associating communism with nuclear threat, Soviet citizens with anti-Christ, and bomb shelters, secret cities for underground, and weapons orbiting our planet, with daily, normal life.  Perhaps this increasingly common mentality is the worst effect of our nuclear, cold war age.  In a planet which desperately needs our focus on environmental and humanitarian issues, my country has spent uncountable trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons testing, improvement, and implementation.  As a commonplace goal and testimonial landmark to 9 presidential administrations, the cold war has manifested its awesome power and control over nearly every facet of Americana; from survival kits and basement bombshelters to an ever circulating cheif Executive commandpost from the air.
  	In just the past three years our family of nations has seen the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and hundreds of other smaller symbols of freedom, and an end to oppression in many circumstances.  With this, the walls, barbed wire, and mental barriers are falling, bringing more change than our planet has seen since its genesis.  Although the old habits die hard, they are indeed dying.  In America the military has been reduced by several thousand troops, and the production of nuclear warheads has virtually arrived a standstill.  Hopefully, with continued efforts, our use of nuclear fusion and fission will turn from mediums of strategy, destruction, and waste to matters of energy production, medicine, and other humanitarian goals.  With this thawing of attitudes, our frigid planet and cold neighbors may once again be a warm and friendly people.
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