Toward a nuclear-age ethos

We are in the midst of a significant but tortured shift in consciousness concerning the nuclear threat. At precisely such a time, we would do well to consider what might be an appropriate set of convictions - appropriate psychologically and in terms of life enhancement. The 10 principles the authors wish to elaborate are simple ones, already adopted by a growing number of people. We face a new dimension of destruction - not a matter of disaster or even of a war - but rather of an end; an end to human civilization and perhaps humankind. This concept violates our ignored mental constructs concerning human continuity: though we can imagine particular cultures being impaired or even destroyed, we expect humankind to heal itself sufficiently to survive. But the findings of a possible ''nuclear winter'' effect concretize the idea of a nuclear end, and, however grim, serve the imagination in the difficult task of looking into the abyss in order to see beyond it. The image of the nuclear end includes not only death and suffering on the most massive scale but, beyond that, nothingness. Two relatively recent historical events, the Nazi holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assist that kind of imaginative act