It may take the trained, analytic minds of scientists to
understand how the thinking processes of apartheid's supporters
function.
For instance, seeing the September 27, 1989 news report in the
West that the Johannesburg City Council voted to enact "Limited
desegregation," how many--unaware of this brief history i
reiterate here up to as recently as April, 1989--would have
realized that the 'improvements' still would permit
Irene Mzizi to die today? Segregation continues in
Johannesburg's hospital and education systems under the new
guidelines.
I wrote "Science Fiction" in August, 1983, partly inspired by seeing that "M*A*S*H" episode and partly after reading a report that the Roman Catholic Church, some 350 years after imprisoning Galileo for life after one of its Inquisition hearings for his "heretical" claim that the Earth revolved around the Sun (and not vice versa as the Church had claimed) among other things, had decided to admit an error had been made and that Galileo's contributions to modern scientific thinking were worthy of respect and credibility.
On October 16, 1988 i read the Province article,
"Almost a world war", in which Oleg Gordievski,
the "most senior KGB officer ever recruited by the West" (it
notes), said that when NATO launched "a secret drill to practise
nuclear release procedures in the event of all-out war...Moscow
came close to pushing the panic button...and starting the Third
World War" (in November, 1983).
I drew my awareness of this to Mikhail Gorbachev's
attention in a Christmas, 1988 submission to him, also referring
him to new evidence supporting the "nuclear winter" theory
(detailed in my April, 1989
submissions to Washington's "Center For Defense
Information"). And, in light of this, i raised the matter
of the Soviet plans to "modernize" their short-range nuclear
forces--to which the apparent Soviet response was to cancel
their plans--precipitating the NATO crisis of whether to follow
suit. (NATO ultimately decided to delay its decision until
1992.)
This surprised me somewhat, and the summary-chronology of my
diplomatic work specifically relating to effecting nuclear arms
reductions that i promised in that statement to Gorbachev
i would send in future to him had to be delayed until i could
include more details than i originally regarded as needed. This
may require accessing U.S. Government archives containing my
1978 reports, which may be a chore in this era of obsessive
secrecy by Washington.
Why bother to explain such things to the supposed adversary of the Western democracies, you may ask? Well, there are a number of reasons, one of which only this explanation about "Science Fiction" can provide.
To begin with, in 1985 "Physicians For The Prevention of
Nuclear War" were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in part for
their research culminating in their "nuclear winter" theory. It
suggests that as low a "threshhold" as "500-1000" nuclear
detonations, if crossed, could produce the nuclear winter and
likely the end of human civilization in due course.
William Epstein, former U.N. disarmament adviser and
formulator of former Canadian prime minister Pierre E.
Trudeau's 1978 "nuclear suffocation" strategy, speaking
several years ago on "The Journal", suggested that the
"threshhold" may be as low as "80" nuclear detonations.
Mordechai Vanunu, during his trial a few years ago for
having disclosed previously confidential information about
Israel's nuclear arms capabilities, revealed that Israel may
already have more than that number of nuclear arms.