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The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
- Sigmund Freud
With this uncannily prophetic pronouncement Freud concluded his book Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930. While Freud may have been justly accused of exaggeration at the time he wrote these words, few would disagree with their truth at this time.
The human species today faces an unprecedented threat. Recent research by physical and biological scientists suggests that the detonation of as little as 4% of the existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons might well lead to a worldwide ecological catastrophe of such magnitude that the continued survival of the human race would become improbable (Erlich et al., 1984). This is the phenomenon known as nuclear winter.
Although mankind has long lived with fantasies and myths of world destruction, from the ancient flood myths to Freud's prophetic statement of 1930, only during the last several years has the possibility that some have imagined and feared shifted into the realm of the real. As Edward Glover (1946) said: “The first promise of the atomic age is that it can make some of our nightmares come true” (p. 274).
The bomb has been with us for over forty years and we have known of its immediate destructive consequences for the same span of time. But it is only recently that we have been faced with the massive proliferation of