While I agree with many of the Top Ten weapons cited, I adamantly believe the Top Weapon of the last 60 years has been (and still remains) is the Atom Bomb.
Why? It ended a war, and fear of the bomb being used has more or less kept another World War from breaking out. To this date, the premier concern of diplomats is nuclear proliferation.
No weapon has ever, ever had as much impact on the entire world as the Atom Bomb.

chfnelson,

The only thing which has kept World War from breaking out is the certainty that the only proxy powers which were entrusted to have them /outside the U.S./ were all Western themselves.

Not simply because 'they were more trustworthy than the Warsaw Pact'. But rather because if Russia overran NATO Europe, and what amounts to an operationally independent strategic force in France and Britain obliterated their fielded forces as well as command and control rather than accept a creeping adventurism as proved to be such a bad idea with Hitler, Russia (specifically Moscow), which is also a part of Europe would be a headless chicken without any active participation by the U.S. at all.

The Russians could never get past that stalemate decision while they 'pretended not to want the other half' of what they sided with the Nazis to steal in 1939.

Yet the same game also works in reverse because now, it is the U.S. who is in the untenable position of having -worldwide- trade and strategic assets jeopardized by Russian and Chinese attempts to deny what they cannot own. And because Russia in particular now has no block nor piece-of-pie incentive of her own, she can compromise completely the U.S. economic model of distributionist capitalism by which ACCESS to cheap resources and slave labor production sources is key to our continued lamprey-capitalism success.

And the way to deny that access is to give everyone and their mother's uncle a nuclear weapons capability of their very own.

So that to break the little guy WE are the ones risking multibillion dollar carrier battlegroups while forced to the ultimate means of assured victory at the cost of razed earth results.

Particularly now that we are technologically so close to _non-nuclear_ trigger mechanisms; the false positive notion (we haven't been nuked yet, thus Homeland Securities ideal of registered traders bringing in 1,000s of tons of trade goods with little or no inspection is working) of national integrity of our borders in the post bipolar age is ridiculous. Just as the notion that an isotope tagged nuclear material residue will empower us to more than hollow vengeance when the heart of Wall Street or some other 'national infrastructure' city is obliterated.

Russian can crush any (cough, Iran) country stupid enough to attack her directly. And yet those client states can render _too costly_ (in-theater or in CONUS) any U.S. attempt to attack a label like 'rogue state'.

Russia wins either way because if we don't hold our interests we are squeezed out of the very capitalist system we began. And if we fight to do so, we face threats which can despoil utterly what we seek to take.

CONCLUSION:
The Atom Bomb and particularly it's first-use demonstrated lack of moral justification by the U.S. on a helpless civilian population in 1945 is not a stabilizing so much as isolating influence.

Given our attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent a complete abrogation of the accepted Hague Convention Laws Of Land Warfare (to which we are signatories) and specifically the articles relating to "Thou shalt not attack a civil target without warning and shall never attack one as it's own point of hostaged vulnerability", it is merely a matter of time before someone with nothing to lose decides to call our hypocrite's bluff.

Only because nobody -weak enough- has enough of them to make an ace-high-nothin' bid into the world of geopolitics which we cannot afford to check to have atomic weapons not achieved their civilization-ending potential...yet.


CJ