Science and Politics

Abstract

NO one could complain that the nineteenth Riddell Memorial Lectures in the University of Durham are lacking in topicality*. The terrifying efficiency of science, the terrifying inefficiency of politics, make, in combination, probably the most difficult and almost certainly the most urgent problem on the world‘s agenda. For much of the pressure of contemporary events, much of the strain that the whole world feels and wilts under, comes from the knowledge that the human race has set itself a problem which it may quite possibly prove to be unable to solve. We are faced, in a far truer sense than we were in 1914, with the possibility of a "war that will end war".