Thursday Books: Are We Ready to Harvest New Killing Fields? ; the Devil's Gardens: A History of Landmines by Lydia Monin and Andrew Gallimore (Pimlico, Pounds 12.50) A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman (Arrow, Pounds 8.99)

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LATE LAST year, prospects for arms control took two severe knocks in a matter of days. In Geneva, the US pulled out of six years of effort to strengthen the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, while on the India/Pakistan border, hundreds of thousands of anti- personnel landmines were laid as tensions mounted over Kashmir. Both events demonstrate the problems in trying to control proliferation, despite huge efforts to bring two particularly nasty kinds of weapons under control.

The Devil's Gardens is a highly readable and thoughtful account of the determined efforts to call governments to account over the appalling human cost of landmines. It illustrates the global …