Nuclear war ‘inevitable’

Press, 25 October 1984, Page 8

Nuclear war ‘inevitable’

PA Wellington A former Secretary of Defence, Sir Jack Hunn, has told a peace gathering that he believes a nuclear holocaust is inevitable. Sir Jack is the first of three knights to speak to lunchtime gatherings during this year’s Week of Prayer for World Peace. He said New Zealand was lucky to have a Government so well aware of the nuclear menace and so determined to ward it off. However he said, “Our own Government’s sanity will not isolate New Zealand from the global effects of a nuclear deluge anywhere else. “Optimists with a sublime faith in the essential goodness of mankind should delude themselves no longer. “Computer control is so prone to error, and reaction time so short, that acciden-

tai launch is virtually certain. “The two super-Powers are quite paranoid with mutual hate and fear, so they compete frantically to increase warheads, and rush madly to the edge of the cliff like the demented Gadarene herd.” Sir Jack said those inclined tO look on the vaunted human intellect as mankind’s spiritual guide should not forget it had conceived “that ultimate obscenity, the H-bomb, and consequently the arms race as the so-called nuclear deterrent.” He described the United States as a “Samson shorn of wisdom” and President Reagan as having an “infantile attraction to firearms from handguns to nuclear missiles.” “No-one so powerful has yet been so alarmingly irrational,” he said.