UN General Assembly
1988

Finally, the curtain has risen on the forty-third session of the General Assembly under favourable auspices. The contours of peace are beginning to appear in many regions, the erstwhile battlegrounds of ideological conflicts and actual war. Just as we know in the physical sciences that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction which can be measured quantitatively, so too, to a limited extent, we can extend the same idea to the social sciences in which peace is central, by applying a qualitative measurement of the promising peaceful events taking place in many regions of the world. The centrifugal forces of discord and disquietude are beginning to yield to centripetal forces of peace and concordance within nations and among nations.