That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

Everyone engaged in research must have had the experience of working with feverish and prolonged intensity to write a paper which no one else will read or to solve a problem which no one else thinks important and which will bring no conceivable reward - which may only confirm a general opinion that the researcher is wasting his time on irrelevancies.

So if you look at the writings of intellectuals, there are two kinds. One said, l"Look, if we fought harder we could have won.But the others, who were way at the left, people like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, way out in left stream, his view in 1975 was the Vietnam war began with blundering efforts to do good. But by 1969, it was clear that it was a disaster, that was too costly to us.

If we move toward the weaponisation of space, we can bid farewell to the planet. The chances of survival are very slight.

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.