The Post-Nuclear Society

Abstract

A survey of possible global disasters which appeared in 1930 does not mention nuclear war, but a similar book from 1953 includes a lengthy chapter on the subject.² The author, himself a scientist, takes as his authority Albert Einstein. In 1945 Einstein argued that although two thirds of the world’s population might be destroyed in a war, ‘enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilisation could be restored.’³ But by 1950 he was writing less sanguinely, ‘In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.’⁴ The Doomsday Clock, an invention of alumni of the Manhattan Project in their Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, concurs with Einstein’s grim prediction; at present its hands are at a few minutes to midnight, closer than they have ever been.⁵

Both professor and prophet depress,

For vision and longer view

Agree in predicting a day

Of convulsion and vast evil¹