J. B. S. HALDANE 
Translocations and deletions of genes would be fairly quickly 
eliminated, and there is no reason to suspect that the muta- 
tions of other types would differ qualitatively from those already 
produced by radioactivity and cosmic particles. There would 
merely be a lot more of them. Imaginative writers with a super- 
ficial knowledge of biology, such as Aldous Huxley and John 
Wyndham, who have written of mutations of new types, have 
done a considerable disservice to clear thinking. 
If the main contending powers are fairly completely elimi- 
nated, and other countries violently disorganized, we shall have 
another dark age, with recovery in a few thousand years, and 
perhaps a repetition of the disaster. Meanwhile the brown and 
black sections of mankind will have learned enough biology to 
believe that the survivors of the white and yellow races are 
genetically contaminated. They may massacre or castrate them, 
or at best subject them to rigorous apartheid in the arctic or some 
other inclement region. 
The third alternative, that of the tyrant world state, is equally 
sinister. Suppose that one of the contending groups in a nuclear 
war is victorious in the sense that half its population and an 
organized government survive, this government would inevit- 
ably attempt to conquer the rest of the world to prevent future 
nuclear wars, and might well succeed. A few centuries of 
Stalinism or technocracy might be a cheap price to pay for the 
unification of mankind. Such a government would perhaps take 
extreme precautions against the outbreak of war, revolution, 
or any other organized quarrels. It might be thought necessary 
to destroy all records of such events; and the successors of Lenin 
or Washington, as the case might be, would not be permitted to 
learn of the deeds of these great men. Most of literature, art, 
and religion would be scrapped. Huxley’s Brave New World 
adumbrates such a society. Owing to the large number of 
harmful recessive genes carried by most people, eugenics, 
largely directed to preventing their coming together, would be 
an important branch of applied science. 
I do not consider the fourth alternative probable. But I 
think that as biologists we should envisage the possibility that 
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