单项选择题

The arms race that has darkened our century with fear and peril may finally be slowing. Weapons have been with us a long time. From personal combat at the very beginning of history to the impersonality of modern warfare, there has been a dynamic escalation in the complexity and specialization of attack and defense. From hand weapons and shields to ballistic missiles and Star Wars, offensive and defensive armaments have co-evolved.
While arms races have been with us for millennia, nothing compares to the wasteful absorption of human talents and the costs in lives, talents, resources, and energy of the past 50 years of war, pseudowar and escalation in deterrence by mutually assured destruction. This has been the killing century.
But as we reflect on the linked interdependence of attack and defense in our century, we need to remember that life on Earth has been involved in a biological arms race for hundreds of millions of years. Compared with that ancient process, the military arms race is but a blink in the eye of history. For a very brief period before the killing started billions of years ago, there was "innocence." At life’s beginning the very first prot-organisms, formed in the "primordial soup," obtained their energy from inorganic sources. Once living things existed, however, some became food sources for others. Life came to eat life, and attack and defense originated on Earth.
According to the passage, human competition to develop the best weapons