In September of 1945 . . .

In September of 1945, Einstein wrote to his friend and colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer: “The wretched attempts to achieve international security, as it is understood today by our governments, do not alter at all the political structure of the world, do not recognize at all the competing sovereign nation-states as the real cause of conflicts.  . . . Without an over-all solution to give up-to-date expression to the democratic sovereignty of the peoples, all attempts to avoid specific dangers in the international field seem to me illusory.”

Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 197