For deathly economy of wording, nothing much beats a pamphlet published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation entitled: WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION (WMD); A Pocket Guide. On this single sheet of paper, America’s celebrated crime-fighting organisation tells you everything you might want to know, if you didn’t want to know much, about weapons of mass destruction.
The second section is all business. It gives the basic information: what is a weapon of mass destruction. The top half of this section says, in a very few words printed in a rather large font, that WMDs come in four varieties. That’s all it says.
The bottom half of the section shows three symbols:
1. A yellow-and-black radiation hazard logo.
2. An orange-and-black biohazard logo.
3. A tilted square composed of four smaller squares, each a different colour, each with its own label: combustible; non-flammable gas; explosives and flammable solid.
A carefully phrased instruction focuses our attention on these icons. It says: “Recognise these universally accepted symbols but do not expect to see them on a WMD device“…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.
NOTE: Click on either image to download a PDF of the entire FBI Pocket Guide to WMDs.