Triumphant science and technology are only at the threshold of man's command over sources of energy so stupendous that, if used for military purposes, they can wipe out our entire civilization.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.
Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.
Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.