UN General Assembly
1960

25. That may happen. Let us not, with more dry logic than humanity, think that fear of such overwhelming evils may prevent the impassioned clash of war. Back in 1939 — how well I remember it — the danger and the destructive capacity of the machinery of war were tremendous. The risk was apparent at that time and even if it was perhaps slow in making itself felt, the possibility was recognized from the very day that war broke out. In 1939, at the beginning of the war, we were protecting our buildings with simple sandbags and, armed with gas-masks, we who lived in the various threatened capitals went about in dread of the conclusion, essentially the same as that which we now anticipate, the possible total destruction of all that we personally care for. Yet the military preparations did not cease on that account, nor did the nations hold back from the final breaking-point of war. Why should the same thing not happen today, if a tremor in the glacier, an accident, can provoke cosmic catastrophe? No, we do not place complete confidence in the fear of peril, since mankind in its folly has overcome that fear many times.