LONDON — Several weeks after his death, Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the designer of the world’s most renowned assault rifle, was quoted posthumously as saying his invention had brought him unbearable “spiritual torment,” as if finally acknowledging something akin to guilt on behalf of a weapon produced and sold in tens of millions to kill on a near-industrial scale.

Previously, General Kalashnikov had boasted that he never missed a night’s sleep over the uses to which his AK-47 — Avtomat Kalashnikova 47 — and its many successors had been put since he designed it in the 1940s.

“My spiritual torment is unbearable,” he wrote to a priest following his embrace of Christianity before he died at age 94 in December. “If my rifle killed people,” he agonized, did it mean that he was “responsible for people’s deaths, even if they were enemies?”

His words said something about the changing patterns of wars and the changing intentions of those who promote and fight them.