4. Why should we care? If you want to have a world that is at peace with itself, you have to start with poverty. Poverty, I mentioned again last week, is the most powerful weapon of mass destruction. Poverty usually is accompanied by lack of good governments, by oppression, and oppression ends in people feeling humiliated, angered, losing hope and faith. When you lose hope and you lose faith, this is a breeding ground for violence, civil war, interstate wars. When you have conflict that has been raging on for a hundred years, 50 years, 60 years, the temptation to acquire the big stick—which is nuclear weapons, like the major powers—it is very tempting. --Mohamed ElBaradei