Pathways to International Security

Professions for World Disarmament and Development, London, Britain

18 March 1989

I feel greatly honoured and privileged to be invited to address this fifth annual conference of Professions for World Disarmament and Development. In the face of such an array of intellectual and professional distinction I have sought some comfort and a degree of consolation from Goethe's maxim that all good ideas in this world have already been thought. But Goethe did add one rather important rider: the point is, to think them again!

Never have ideas had the potential to play so important and decisive a role in defining and shaping our common future as now. There is a compelling need for the world's wealth of professional and political intelligence and imagination to be employed in tackling the problems of our threatened humanity, and the new dangers that dangerously threaten our fragile habitat. We are learning, albeit slowly, that to respond adequately to the deepening global problems that confront us, we must develop a shared analysis and perspective about our world in order that we can create collectively a life-enhancing environment, politically, economically and socially for all its inhabitants.