Biological Possibilities in the Next Ten Thousand Years 
(3) A nuclear war, with such damage, will lead to a highly 
authoritarian world state. 
(4) Rational animals of the human type cannot achieve the 
wisdom needed to use nuclear energy unless they live for several 
centuries. The ageing effect of high energy events renders this 
impossible at present. Hence the only hope for mankind is the 
massacre of the vast majority of us; the few survivors, and most 
of their descendants, being resistant to high energy quanta and 
particles, and thus capable of long life, if they escape prevent- 
able diseases. 
(5) A nuclear war will not occur, but some kind of world 
organization will gradually develop, probably after a general 
disarmament. 
I might add that mankind could very probably be destroyed 
by processes still more lethal than nuclear reactions. 
I do not think that the greatest danger from nuclear weapons 
is the outbreak of an international war of the type usually 
expected. Armies, in the present century at least, have, I think, 
been more often used in civil than international wars, though the 
latter have killed more people. I think it quite as likely that a 
group of fanatical devotees of Mary, Marx, Muhammad, or 
Mammon, may get hold of enough fissile material to force their 
own government into submission and thus precipitate an inter- 
national war, as the American and French revolutions did. 
Were I the head of most States, I should be more frightened of 
the armed forces of my own country than those of others. This 
is one reason why disarmament is so urgent a necessity. 
Personally I do not think a nuclear war would lead to the 
extinction of mankind. There may well be more than enough 
plutonium to kill us all, just as there are enough rifle bullets to 
kill us all several hundred times, and enough lethal genes to 
kill us about twice. But the last desperate surviving rocketeers 
of a defeated state would hardly use their weapons to massacre 
neutrals. The survivors all over the world would be short-lived, 
and for many centuries there would be an incidence of con- 
genital disease leading to suffering and mortality com- 
parable with that due to infectious disease until quite recently. 
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