Our vocabulary has been enriched with a new adjective that increases anxiety and fear: "Hypersonic". We have been capable of enormous progress in improving the conditions of humanity, but the race to arms for Amin Maalouf, writer, intellectual, President of the French Academy, reveals "our inability to manage relationships between the different components of humanity". Maalouf, speaking in Paris at the assembly of the international meeting of the Community of Sant'Egidio "Imagining Peace", in which the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron took part, underlined how the arms race is the result of a "sphere of maximum collective incompetence, such as to endanger everything we have achieved so far, at all levels".
And yet at the beginning of this century, we might have thought that the battle for world peace had already been won. The international meeting that opens today in Paris "supports this hope, it is the most legitimate and decisive that there is".
Between two and three billion of our contemporaries have emerged from poverty and marginalization, but "conflicts are multiplying and becoming more severe, relations between the great powers are becoming dire and a new arms race has now begun, before our eyes". It has resumed and "not only in terms of the number of warheads. Today we are working to develop the quality of armaments, to make them more precise, more effective, more manageable and, above all, much faster. The term that recurs continuously in the specialist literature is that of 'hypersonic'".
