Abstract
In 1984 Dr Helen Caldicott, the Australian physician who resigned from the Harvard Medical School faculty to devote her full time to the prevention of nuclear war, stated that according to the nuclear clock, the world had seven minutes until midnight, midnight signifying the occurrence of the “unthinkable event”. Certainly, over the past decade, the nuclear pessimists have (given Dr Caldicott’s statement), been proved more correct than such comparative optimists as John David Garcia, who in 197 1 stated that “nuclear annihilation has about a 50-50 chance of occurring in the near future”.’ Garcia went on to predict that if nuclear holocaust miraculously did not happen, then the most probable causes for mankind’s extinction would be poisoning of the biosphere by genetic decay and pollution.2 Can mankind take heart when world statesmen resurrect “the cold war” through verbal escalation, often for no apparent reason (hence appearing irrational to the extreme, given the possible ramifications of their words?) Is there, in other words, some positive element to which the average human being, in any nation world-wide, might cling, in the hope for survival? It would appear that throughout history pessimism has been perennial, whether we cite Antiphon, the Sophist in Ancient Greece, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (the latter characterizing life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and “a war of every man against every man”), or enter the realm of literature, and study the Weltanschauung ofHamlet. 3 Nor is there a current shortage: “soothsayers
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