Albert Einstein’s infamous maxim about a hypothetical World War IV sounds so naive and unrealistic when interpreted literally. It seems obvious to me that the great astrophysics genius’s intention in coining this sentence was somewhere between satire and dramatic didacticism in the two parts of his assertion.

In the first, he claimed not to know what weapons would be used in a (God forbid!) third-world conflagration – it was clear that he was fully aware of the danger posed by nuclear bombs, so much so that he begged the US government, in writing, to speed things up before the Nazis did. At the end of his bombastic statement, he declared that he knew in advance what weapons would be used in a fictional World War IV: “sticks and stones.”

Indeed, a brilliant mind like his could perfectly foresee that there would be no more humanity on the surface of the Earth after the outbreak of a nuclear conflict of global proportions.

May we listen to the sarcastic but pacifist voice of the very sharp intelligence focused on the “infinitely great,” in the last century, and develop a modicum of sense in this apocalyptic era we are living in, with so many possible routes to civilizational self-extinction, as the ecological and health crises indicate, as well as the one related to nuclear warmongering, while there is still time to reverse the lines of planetary events toward the abyss…

Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar 
and Spiritual Friends
LaGrange, New York, USA
August 26, 2021