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If you’re in any doubt about the horrific and macabre nature of antipersonnel weapons and the people who design them, The Technology of Killing by Eric Prokosch (Zed Books, £16.95, ISBN 1 85649 358 X) will set you straight It begins with the science of wound ballistics – how a munitions fragment travelling at speed rips through a body creating shock waves that pulverise organs far from the wound – and describes American military volumes filled with pictures of naked, dead soldiers with parts of their bodies blown away and captioned “Wound of entrance” and “Wound of exit”. Not for the faint-hearted.