UN General Assembly
1970

54. I would appeal to the delegations concerned to withdraw these reservations as a token of that decisive commitment without which the Second Development Decade, like the first, would be doomed to failure. In my judgment, this is one failure the United Nations cannot afford. We have reached a fateful juncture in our affairs. The phrase "time is running out" is no longer a figure of speech, but the literal truth. 55. I have described the 1970s as a dangerous decade because there is danger of international respect for human rights becoming unenforceable, of the poverty gap becoming unbridgeable, and of the nuclear arms race becoming uncontrollable. 56. Consider the gravity of our predicament. 57. In the matter of survival: with more devastating weapons of mass destruction being produced and no system of effective controls in sight, mankind is much closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation by accident, by miscalculation, by a lapse of intelligence or will, or by suicidal folly. Never in history has the survival of humanity hung on such a very thin thread.