My Library

Back then, this prospect of nuclear destruction caused everyone to to pause who was reasonably awake with some kind of intellectual awareness of the world. Since the 1950s, this fear had been contained within ideological precincits which justified the necessity of nuclear devices as deterrents on behalf of peace and the balances of Cold War political powers. But by 1967, the fear had transcended ideological values. The Cold War was of course in full swing, and on whose behalf a very hot war was going on in Vietnam with the Soviets sending massive amounts of aid and assistance to the North Vietnamese Communists. The United States and other Western-nation participation was going down in flames and the horror of accumulating body bags -- resulting in the wide-spread realization that the rationale for that war was nutso-whacko. This realization, however, was more perceived at the public level than within official government circles -- as was the threat of universal nuclear destruction. Now occurred a phenomenon somewhat blithely remembered in history as "student unrest." It was a phenomenon which no one predicted, and one which has never been submitted to the insightful scrutiny it should have been. It was within this unrest that the Ban-The-Bomb commitment took on focus, and also in which War was not seen as a necessary and inevitable factor in human existence, but as a problem of human consciousness.