At a time of unbridled nuclear arms race, the dangerous escalation of the Cold War, and heated debates between physicists, political scientists, and peace activists, Jaspers was one of the few philosophers to take a detailed stance on the possibility of humanity's self-destruction in his 500-page work from 1958, which quickly became a bestseller. In view of the pitfalls of political thinking in dealing with what he considered to be equally serious threats from the atomic bomb and totalitarianism, Jaspers saw the only salvation as the influence of the "super-political" as the rational ethos in each individual that makes peace possible. However, with his prerequisite of a "revolution in thinking" and his demand to move away from thinking in terms of feasibility and usefulness, he resisted the temptation to "childishly simplify" the discourse on the possible self-annihilation of humanity with supposedly simple solutions (Hochhuth). At the same time, however, his unorthodox approach exposed him to incomprehension and accusations of meaningless "philosophical confusion."

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