Everywhere I turn, whether it is to trendy new magazines like Wired or Internet, or to the mesmerised users of the equipment at the latest hot spot in town, the Cybersmith, where access to state-of-the-art cyberspace technologies can be rented, or even while lurching along the Infobahn myself, I am bombarded with 'data' that proclaims the arrival of a new community in cyberspace.

When the former Soviet Union and the United States declared their intention radically to reduce their nuclear weapons arsenals, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. But the relief lasted not much longer than the sigh.

Less than six months ago, attention was riveted on horrifying tales of massive new threats to international security - the appearance of nuclear weapons' material on the black market in Germany. Without these products (bomb-useable uranium and plutonium) the attempts of would-be nuclear nations such as Iran, Iraq, and Libya could be at least forestalled by years, if not stymied. Terrorists, increasingly a threat to worldwide security, would have to make do with conventional explosives - already devastating in their impact, as so many of the often-suicidal missions in Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, or the bombings of the New York World Trade Center, and the Pan AM Lockerbie flight, have demonstrated in numbing detail. Nevertheless nuclear radiation holds the greatest terror.

Dorothy Zinberg comments that the appearance of nuclear materials in Germany and Hungary dramatically points up the need to upgrade systems to control and account for nuclear materials in Russia.