Daily Inspiration Quote by Alva Myrdal

A chill runs through Myrdal's sentence because it refuses the comfort of euphemism. She names the trajectory not as "arms competition" or "deterrence" but as drift: a passive verb that indicts everyone who lets policy run on autopilot. Then she snaps the reader awake with that jagged self-correction - "extermination - or rather, to be more exact" - performing the very diplomacy she practiced. Precision becomes a moral act. If leaders insist on abstract language, she insists on the physical inventory of what would actually vanish: towns, fields, people.

The "absurd target" is doing heavy work. It frames nuclear strategy as a grotesque parody of rational planning, a bureaucratic goal-setter aimed at annihilation. Myrdal isn't arguing that extermination is likely; she's arguing that it's been normalized as thinkable, even administratively manageable. The subtext is Scandinavian clarity deployed against superpower theater: the Cold War's grim logic depends on treating mass death as a stable equilibrium. Call it absurd, and the whole edifice starts to wobble.

Her focus on the "northern hemisphere" is not parochial; it's accusatory. The hemisphere that congratulates itself for producing "our civilization" is also the one stockpiling the means to erase it. That possessive "our" is a trap for complacent Western audiences: if you cherish the achievements of modernity, why tolerate a security doctrine that puts them on a hair trigger? Myrdal's intent is to make strategic discourse feel shamefully concrete - to force policymakers to see the map as a home, not a game board.