Assiduous readers will recall in my "047. The seven governances of man" that I suggested that there have been several distinct types of governance since our hunter-gatherer days, and that each of them was brought to an end when it proved to be defenceless against a new type of weapon.

I suggested that the nation-state days were numbered ever since the nuclear bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. My argument is not so much that a nuclear weapon is overwhemlingly destructive but mainly that it was the forerunner of very powerful weapons that can be contained in a single device small enough to be smuggled and used by individuals.

A photograph which had a big impact on me about 20 years ago was of a Russian KGB (secret service) Colonel who had smuggled an object symbolising a nuclear bomb into America and was standing (wearing the usual spooks' raincoat!) with a large suitcase at his side with the White House clearly in the background. The photo was taken by the KGB to show Stalin that the American government could, in fact, be easily destroyed by such an attack. And, of course, the converse was true. And that was the reason why the Russians allowed the photo to leak to newspapers in the west -- so that an unspoken "understanding" could be reached between the American and the Soviet presidents that they wouldn't get up to such nasty tricks as personal assassination -- and, indeed, governmental assassination.

This understanding between the two presidents was rather like the understanding that was reached between the German and English front-line troops in the First World War. Whenever it was time for a heavy barrage to take place (ordered by the officers), each side (that is, the ordinary soldiers thereof) would fire a few preliminary warning shots so that their opponents could prepare themselves. The fact that on Christmas day both front-lines got out of their trenches, swopped presents and played football was just another instance of the more sophisticated game that they were playing between them -- which, of course, officers on both sides were constantly trying to prevent.

But terrorists are not subject to the same game rules. And the weapons don't have to be nuclear bombs. In fact, they don't have to be weapons at all in the ordinary sense. We saw this on 11 September 2001. If the planes had been flown into the White House and Capitol Hill, goodness knows how America would have functioned in the days and weeks afterwards.

The news this morning of the attempt to smuggle a Russian Igla missile into America is another example of the vulnerability of the nation-state to the use of sophisticated individual weapons of great destructive power. America, by itself, was incapable of defending itself. The FBI needed the help of Russian and British secret services also, in order to clearly implicate and catch the arms dealer concerned. The extraordinary cooperation that occurred between the three secret services (which normally operate against one another) is a good example of the necessary trans-national type of governance that is going to be increasingly needed in the future. Nation-states alone are now no longer capable of protecting themselves.

But it is not just in military matters that transnational, decentralised governances are going to be required. There are several other issues of huge concern -- international trade, freshwater supplies, rain forest protection, energy resources, pollution, etc -- which will be beyond the control of individual nation-states. We don't want a United Nations type of world government because that would only become an over-bureaucratised, over-centralised, over-politicised, overblown version of the nation-states that we have now. But we certainly need lateral forms of specialised governance for several important world problems, some of which now threaten to be overwhelming.

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