Summits like those in Geneva promote hope. But hope without action is hopeless. Our enthusiasm for the positive spirit in these deliberations must no… - Bernard Lown

We physicians have focused on the nuclear threat as the singular issue of our era. We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties. But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival.

Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem "Darkness":

Every historic period has had its Cassandras. Our era is the first in which prophecies of doom stem from objective scientific analyses.