Presented as a Plenary Lecture at the 55th Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs "60 Years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki"
22-27 July 2005, Hiroshima, Japan.

This review essay examines a set of books and documents that illuminate the dominant American threat perceptions in the post–September 11 environment and analyse both the strategies and the new directions that have emerged in U.S. policy in response to the new threat perceptions.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of offense-defense theory. It includes contending views on the theory and some of the most recent attempts to refine and test it.

"Iran is a normal country. We are not evil and we do not understand why the U.S. government includes us in the axis of evil." This was a common refrain encountered in Tehran in May 2004 by a visiting group of Westerners, including myself, organized by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The visit included a workshop on Iran's relations with the West held in collaboration with Iran's Institute for Political and International Studies. The time in Tehran-a huge, traffic-choked city-also included sessions at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Tehran and at Tehran's Center for Strategic Studies, as well as meetings with senior officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Expediency Council.

The book looks first at the relationship between weapons and security, discussing such aspects of proliferation as "nuclear entrepreneurship" in Russia and the threat of biological warfare. It then examines nonmilitary security concerns, including resource scarcity, migration, HIV/AIDS in Africa, and why humanitarian assistance sometimes does more harm than good. Finally, it looks at the role of transnational actors, including terrorist groups, nongovernmental organizations, and the privatized military industry.