The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist, was carried out by Israel's Mossad using an autonomous machine gun.

Russia is developing an undersea Poseidon nuclear torpedo that can travel across an ocean under its own guidance, evading existing missile defenses to deliver a nuclear weapon days after it is launched.

This is the brace new frontier of the 21st century warfare. Nothing will stop the current crop of nuclear powers from pushing their autonomous warfare capabilities to the limit. It will be an arms race like no other (with China quite likely coming out on top).

Picture the scene. The year is 1968.

A turbulent America is at the peak of its long entanglement in Vietnam. The camera pans to the left, and there we spy our hero. Donald Trump, twenty-two years old, tall and lean of limb, the fair-haired scion of a prominent New York family.

Donald has recently completed his studies, a period during which he received four academic deferments from military service. In 1964 he graduated from New York Military Academy, where he marched and drilled proudly with the best of his cohort. Then Fordham came calling, and later Wharton School, from which he graduated that spring with a degree in economics.

Donald prides himself an athlete and sportsman, and for good reason. At college he excelled at football, squash, and tennis. And just that spring, he discovered what would become a lifelong love of golf, learning the game on the links near Wharton. He was a formidable competitor.

With health, wealth, and good looks, it was in many ways a charmed life for Donald. But an important decision shadowed the horizon. With the last of his academic deferments now expired — and war still raging in Southeast Asia — Donald’s deployment to Vietnam was a real possibility. The United States could call on him to serve.

On November 1, 1964, just as he was gaining real traction, Reverend Martin Luther King received a vicious blackmail letter. The anonymous writer threatened to destroy him personally and professionally, and suggested he just commit suicide and save somebody a bullet.

Most now believe the letter was written by deputy FBI director William Sullivan, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover. But no one saw that letter, or even knew it existed. The government’s secret campaign to hamstring the civil-rights movement by taking out its leader only came to light after The New York Times smoked that letter out in 2014. Want to know more? You can’t. All materials surrounding the case have been ordered sealed until 2027.

Democracy is the defining virtue of Western political systems. We worry that if it fails we’ve got nothing. That’s why what’s happening now is so troubling. Democracy seems to be on the verge of failing. We’re stuck in a political deadlock.

But the real glue in the gears of democracy isn’t what you think. It isn’t the lack of a third party that will do things differently. It isn’t apathy that keeps folks from voting, or fear of arrest that keeps them from protesting.

It’s secrecy.

Maybe every generation feels confronted by some crisis that will determine the fate of the planet. But unless your head is buried in the sand, it’s not possible to be ignorant of the extraordinary planetary crisis that confronts all of us today. Environmental collapse no longer merely threatens: we are well into it and it’s already apparent that civilization as we know it is going to be transformed in some very uncomfortable ways by the mutually-reinforcing breakdown of ecological systems, especially global climate change, ozone depletion, rapid disappearance of many species, and various types of pollution, including some we don’t know about yet.

Although our globalizing economic system is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the biosphere, the ceos who direct this system (as much as anyone controls it) can’t plan much further than the next quarterly report, anymore than politicians can think further than the next election. Overpopulation, pandemics, and the increasing deprivation of basic necessities for vast numbers of people threaten social breakdown, while the media – profit-making enterprises whose primary focus is the bottom-line, rather than investigating and revealing the truth – distract us with infotainment and assurances that the solution is “more of the same”: keep the faith, hang in there long enough and eventually technological development and economic growth, more consumerism and greater GNP will resolve our problems.

As if that were not enough, our ignorant, corrupt and arrogant leaders, or rather rulers, have shown themselves to be inept at everything except lying and gaining power. Now that their deceit and incompetence are coming back to haunt them, their popularity has been plummeting – but at the same time they have been consolidating their power. The faces will change, while the power structure remains much the same, unless we find ways to do something about it.

One of the most important tools for maintaining their power is fear, which requires replacing the Cold War with a never-ending “war on terror” that means never-ending profits for a military-industrial complex that fattens on war and would collapse without it. Intentionally or not, the war on terror has been prosecuted in a way guaranteed to produce a dozen more despairing people who hate the US for every “terrorist” we kill. Our aggressive efforts to suppress terrorism ensure that it will continue. As Peter Ustinov put it, terrorism is the war of the poor; war is the terrorism of the rich. The violence of small terrorist groups such as al Qaeda is, in the final analysis, trivial compared to the “state terrorism” (including sanctioned torture) that we feel justified in unleashing on anyone else who scares us or challenges our “national interests.”