Thomas W. Wolfe

The great predicament of the modern world was summed up by the late President Kennedy in one of his last public remarks: "The family of man can survive differences of race and religion . . . it can accept differences in ideology, politics, economics. But it cannot survive, in the form in which we know it, a nuclear war." Widespread appreciation of this fact accounts in part for the growing significance of the strategic dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly in so far as it represents a means by which the two great nuclear powers may seek to clarify the complexities and mitigate the dangers of their strategic relationship in the nuclear-missile age.