Abstract

We cannot think seriously on the importance of this subject without being horrified at some of its suggested implications. What makes it so baffling is the difficulty of discriminating between what is positive, negative and purely hypothetical in the current estimates. The idea of a nuclear war which, as we are told by men of the highest eminence in the natural sciences, would condemn the whole of mankind to extinction, dislocates our sense of reality. Man, it is true, is not a necessary being; the mortality of his individual existence is an image of the human condition generally. The transmission of humanity as a historical fact is something we accept as not merely fortuitous but as imposed, at the biological level, in the evidence of cumulative experience. This by itself is not conclusive as regards the continuity of the human race. On the biological record the number of forms that have survived is infinitesimal as compared with those that have become extinct.