Treat others as you would have them treat you.  Apparently predating modern religion, the Ancient Greek ethic of reciprocity is the mutual and cooperative exchange of favors, rights or privileges.  From Brahmanism to Zoroastrianism, virtually every system of morality ever conceived shares the basic ideal also known as “the golden rule.” 

This beautiful founding moral precept simplifies sometimes-complex moral dilemmas.  If you would not want others to lie to you, do not lie to others.  If you would not want your government to advance a religion in which you do not believe, do not work to advance your religion through government.  Just as personal morality and reciprocity should prevent minor immoral acts, they should also thwart immorality’s most infamous act, killing a human being.  Therefore, one might expect the ethic of reciprocity to avert war and its unethical sequelae such as profiteering and torture. 

Yet as human history evolved increasingly complex ethics, growing numbers of religions and divergent variations in religious belief, it has also witnessed apparently unbridled expansion of war and wars.  The unremitting application of science to the “art” of war relentlessly evolves ever more deadly weapons.  We the People of planet earth routinely expend unimaginable biological, chemical, economic, energy, engineering, food, fuel and water resources raising armies for the express purpose of killing people on the other side of the invisible lines dividing us against ourselves.  Armies and the wars they so often wage drain the life out of earth’s economies, environments, infrastructure, people and schools.  To quote perhaps the greatest general of the 20^th century, Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Even this is not enough.  More than sixty years ago, humans first exploded single bombs capable of destroying entire cities.  Detonated above Nagasaki Japan on August 9, 1945 between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi Ordnance Works, one primitive plutonium fission weapon generated temperatures of 7000 F and winds exceeding 600 mph.  This single nuclear bomb had a “radius of total destruction” of approximately one mile, ignited fires two miles wide and apparently killed 40,000 to 70,000 people instantly, 80,000 by the end of 1945 and more than 145,000 by 2008.  By 1952, humans were creating “hydrogen” bombs thousands of times more powerful by applying a fusion process learned from stars. 

Twenty years after the “cold war” allegedly ended, it appears planet earth harbors about 21,500 nuclear weapons (Russia and the United States having about 10,000 each), with the vast majority apparently ready to fire from aircraft, artillery weapons, missiles, submarines and perhaps even briefcases.  The United States spends about as much on its military as all other nations combined and allocates almost half of all taxes to current and past military expenses.

No matter what the belief system (or lack thereof) it is easy to see ourselves as moral even as the nation we supposedly lead does apparently immoral things.  How much longer can we consider ourselves comfortable with these stunningly powerful weapons, shrug off war’s “unavoidable” “collateral damage” or believe that we are treating others as we would wish to be treated as we wield them?