Bashar al-Assad killing Syrians through starvation: The Syrian dictator is denying food to thousands.: To the modern imagination, there is nothing so terrifying as a high-tech weapon. Our horror movies are filled with crashing planes, engineered viruses, and rogue computers that have taken charge of spaceships. Our security nightmares have long been focused on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The phrase we use to describe these contemporary horrors, "weapons of mass destruction," implies something diabolically modern, something so innovative that it can kill thousands in an instant.
But in our obsession with what is terrifyingly new, it seems we have forgotten that there are much older ways to kill large numbers of people. Certainly there is one weapon of mass destruction so ancient and low-tech that it doesn't even involve gunpowder, let alone the lethal tools we so dismissively refer to as conventional weapons. This method is called "starvation."