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1、精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文-全程指导写作 独家原创 1 / 11英文演讲英文演讲: :我们该选择死亡吗？我们该选择死亡吗？ SHALL WE CHOOSE DEATH? Bertrand Russell December 30, 1954 I am speaking not as a Briton, not as a European, not as a member of a western democracy, but as a human being, a member of the species Man, whose continued existence is i
2、n doubt. The world is full of conflicts: Jews and Arabs; Indians and Pakistanis; white men and Negroes in Africa; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between communism and anticommunism. Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of t
3、hese issues; but I want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings for the moment and consider yourself only as a member of a biological species which has had a remarkable history and whose disappearance none of us can desire. I shall try to say no single 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文-全程指导写作 独家原创 2 / 11wo
4、rd which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it. We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves not what steps can be taken to give military victory t
5、o whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps. The question we have to ask ourselves is: What steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all sides? The general public, and even many men in positions of authority, have not realized what
6、would be involved in a war with hydrogen bombs. The general public still thinks in terms of the obliteration of cities. It is understood that the new bombs are more powerful than the old and that, while one atomic bomb could obliterate Hiroshima, one hydrogen bomb could obliterate the largest cities
7、 such as London, New York, and Moscow. No doubt in a hydrogen-bomb war great cities would be 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文-全程指导写作 独家原创 3 / 11obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York, and Moscow were exterminated, the world might, in t
8、he course of a few centuries, recover from the blow. But we now know, especially since the Bikini test, that hydrogen bombs can gradually spread destruction over a much wider area than had been supposed. It is stated on very good authority that a bomb can now be manufactured which will be 25,000 tim
9、es as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima. Such a bomb, if exploded near the ground or under water, sends radioactive particles into the upper air. They sink gradually and reach the surface of the earth in the form of a deadly dust or rain. It was this dust which infected the Japanese fisherm
10、en and their catch of fish although they were outside what American experts believed to be the danger zone. No one knows how widely such lethal radioactive particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with hydrogen bombs is quite likely to put an end to th
11、e human race. It is feared that if many 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文-全程指导写作 独家原创 4 / 11hydrogen bombs are used there will be universal death - sudden only for a fortunate minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration. Here, then, is the problem which I present to you, stark a
12、nd dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race1 or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war. The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding
13、 of the situation more than anything else is that the term mankind feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity And so they hope that perhaps war may be allow
14、ed to continue provided modern weapons are prohibited. I am afraid this hope is illusory. Whatever agreements not to use hydrogen bombs had been reached in time of 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文-全程指导写作 独家原创 5 / 11peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war, and both sides would set to w
15、ork to manufacture hydrogen bombs as soon as war broke out, for if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious. As geological time is reckoned, Man has so far existed only for a very short period one million years at the most. What he has achieved, especially during the last 6,000 years, is something utterly new in the history of the Cosmos, so far at least as we are acquainted with it. For countless ages the sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the stars s
