"The war and all its components continue underground, preparing for a more dangerous and a more destructive war in the future.

"The whole past has been respectful of the warrior. It is only just now in these few past years that war has become a dirty four-letter word, and peace has become for the first time a desire and a longing of the very heart of humanity.

"As far as I am concerned, war has become almost impossible.

"The impossibility of war is based on two fundamentals. One is a human consciousness about the futility of war. Nobody can claim that it is something beautiful, something honorable, something which gives dignity to humanity. Slowly, slowly it has penetrated into human consciousness that war takes away all dignity. It makes man fall below animals, because even animals don't kill their own species; lions don't kill other lions, deer don't kill other deer. It is only man who kills other human beings. It is a disqualification, not a great quality to be honored.

"So the first thing is that war has fallen into disrespect, into utter futility, stupidity; it has lost all its past glory and significance.

"Secondly, the war materials – atomic energy and nuclear weapons – have reached to such a point that they have made war impossible. Unless the whole of humanity suddenly goes mad, war is impossible, because the only purpose of war was to defeat the enemy, the only purpose was to be victorious. Victory was the end. But now, with nuclear weapons, there is no defeat, no victory; no one is defeated, no one becomes victorious, all are dead. The whole life on the planet simply disappears.

"What Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus, Zarathustra and the great teachers of humanity have not been able to convince man about, has been done by nuclear weapons. Now war means only one thing: a global suicide. And no man is ready to commit suicide. In fact, the closer comes the possibility of a third world war, the deeper becomes the urge to live – and to live more consciously, and to live more lovingly, and to live more intensely. A longing for life itself has never been so intense and so profound as it is today."