“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking" wrote Albert Einstein in 1946. A new book, Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking (Walker and Co., 1988), attempts to change those modes of thinking. The Beyond War Foundation, a nonprofit educational group, brought together dozens of scholars from Western nations and the Soviet Union to discuss the politics, science and ethics of nuclear disarmament. In this excerpt from the book, which is also being published in Russian by a Soviet press, two scientists call on their colleagues to become active participants in the nuclear debate.
Over the last 411 years we have seen the world’a nuclear arsenals grow to immense proportions. In destructive power, they are equivalent to 1 million Hiroshimas. Our planet itself has finally become too small for them. Apart from their sheer might, the intelligence and the deadly accuracy of these weapons have grown...
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