A Hopeful Future for Mankind

Louis J. Halle

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1980

Article preview: first 500 of 3,459 words total.

Summary:  The first question to which I here address myself is that of what chance humankind has of forever escaping such nuclear warfare as might largely foreclose any possibility of a hopeful future. The second is that of what provision our kind might make for the retention of a hopeful future in any case.

Louis J. Halle, recently retired as Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, was a member of the Policy Planning Staff in the U.S. Department of State from 1952 to 1954. He is the author of Men and Nations, The Cold War as History, The Ideological Imagination, Out of Chaos, and other works.

The first question to which I here address myself is that of what chance humankind has of forever escaping such nuclear warfare as might largely foreclose any possibility of a hopeful future. The second is that of what provision our kind might make for the retention of a hopeful future in any case.

In the largest perspective it is not implausible that life as a whole, having developed for so long and so hopefully on earth, should nevertheless disappear from it at last, leaving it as lifeless as other planets-or leaving it inhabited only by such primitive forms as bacteria. Our sun is only one of some ten trillion similar stars that we may suppose to be attended by planets of which some millions, at least, must possess the environmental characteristics that led to the development of life on earth. It is statistically implausible that, in such a universe, life has arisen only on the equivalent of one otherwise undistinguished speck among vast clouds of dust-specks extending over distances measured in billions of light-years. In the immensity of the universe as a whole, it may be that the extinction of life on one planet among millions of others that support it would be no more important than the death of one fish in an ocean that contained millions. Although a nuclear war would not in itself suffice for the immediate extinction of all human life, let alone all the forms of life on earth, it might contribute importantly to a progressive deterioration of the environmental circumstances on which the most developed forms of life, at least, depend.

What distinguishes us human beings from all the less advanced forms of life on earth is that, having at last become conscious of the challenge of survival, we have consciously undertaken to shape our own future. This requires us to look ahead, even beyond the span of any single generation.

II

Virtually the sole device by which our kind has averted a nuclear war during the first generation that has possessed nuclear armaments has been that of mutual nuclear deterrence. Granted an element of moral inhibition against destroying life in cold blood, granted an element of uncertainty in the use of weapons never used before, granted an intuitive fear of reaping the whirlwind, the only strategic device we have yet found for preventing nuclear devastation has been the threat of retaliation in kind. So the two principal powers on earth, the United States and the Soviet Union, confront each other like two fighters who, although each holds a pistol aimed at the other, do not fight. How long can such a situation last?

One may admit that it can last indefinitely without believing that it can last forever. For one thing, it depends on the maintenance of political control in each of the two countries. But all societies are subject to breakdowns that may entail the replacement of internationally responsible government. It happened in Germany in 1933, in Iran in 1979; and ...

End of preview: first 500 of 3,459 words total.