Cabled summaries sometimes distort a speaker's real meaning, and there
may be something of that behind the ascription to Bertrand Russell, speaking in Sydney, of the assertion:- " I believe we are already in the initial stages of a third world war which, when it really starts, is likely to last ten years. Anybody living in London will probably not survive, but I think America, South Africa and Australia will."
And Russia ? But this is very pernicious stuff. There is enough cause for anxiety in the world today without artificially-manufac- tured alarms. Lord Russell is primarily a mathematician and moral scientist, not a physicist, and very definitely not a soldier. His prediction that a third world war will last ten years is worth about as much as Danny Kaye's ; and as for the probability that the whole of the eight-million population of London, or such of them as do not get away in time, will be destroyed, at least as many physicists would challenge that dictum as woula endorse it.
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