A Quote by Ian Mcewan
In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.
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Environmental scientists also show us clearly that from the environmental and ecological points of view that nuclear war is not preventable. The only way to get rid of this danger is to abolish all nuclear weapons
For my generation, coming of age at the height of the Cold War, fear of nuclear winter seemed the leading existential threat on the horizon. But the danger posed by war to all humanity-and to our planet-is at least matched by climate change.
Before progressives were apocalyptic about climate change they were apocalyptic about nuclear energy. Then, after the Cold War ended, and the threat of nuclear war declined radically, they found a new vehicle for their secular apocalypse in the form of climate change.
I came up during the cold war, and during the cold war it was always possible with the then Soviet Union - the Russian leaders behaved carefully and predictably. They didn't engage in nuclear saber rattling. They were able to work with us and align their interests where possible.
In many places around the world, all over the U.S. and Europe there are active nuclear power plants. And for many years during the Cold War the threat of nuclear war was a permanent fear. There's always the concern that human kind is biting off more than they can chew in harnessing nuclear power.
On nuclear war, actions in Syria and at the Russian border raise very serious threats of confrontation that might trigger war, an unthinkable prospect. Furthermore, Trump's pursuit of Obama's programs of modernization of the nuclear forces poses extraordinary dangers. As we have recently learned, the modernized U.S. nuclear force is seriously fraying the slender thread on which survival is suspended.
When we succeeded in winning the Cold War, escaping a nuclear Armageddon that could have killed us all, the U.S. inevitably had a serious problem about an encore: what now for our place in the world?
[A] new generation, innocent of the divisions of the Cold War, this coming-of-age. ... If its members do not feel the urgency to escape the nuclear danger that some of its parents felt, neither has it developed the deep attachment to nuclear arms also often found among their parents, including most of the governing class. ... The call for abolition should therefore be, among other things, a call from an older generation to younger one.
If we are to assume that North Korea becomes a nuclear-power state, of course the danger of having an all-out nuclear war, that possibility is very slim.
I would say the thing you can still see in Black Mirror is that I was probably traumatized by the specter of nuclear war. I was born in 1971, and in the '80s I came to understand that I was inevitably going to be frazzled to death in the nuclear apocalypse.
I don't think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It's the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.
Since the end of the Cold War two main nuclear powers have begun to make big reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Each of them is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear warheads a year.
I not only saw the possibility of nuclear war, I feared it very much. If they started a military conflagration, it would automatically lead to nuclear warfare.
You know, people have actually changed the way they think about nuclear weapons now, post-Cold War, post-9/11. The threat of nuclear weapons is not so much Russia attacking the United States, China. It's not a state-to-state - it's obviously terrorism; it's proliferation.
Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War, and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.
I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?
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