In October 1963, Playboy carried an interview, with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first head of government till then to have appeared in the acclaimed series of the magazine’s interviews (though it was officially refuted).

Playboy: Mr Nehru, during your 16 years as Prime Minister of India, you have endeavoured—with considerable success—to keep yourself and your country aloof from the partisan conflicts of the Cold War. From your vantage point of nonalignment, how would you assess the dominant mood of our time?

Nehru: The symbol of the age is the nuclear bomb—or nuclear energy, if you like, though it is well to remember that today nuclear energy is thought of in terms of bombs only. Man’s thinking is conditioned by that symbol. Probably, the prevailing feeling in the world today is fear. Almost everybody is afraid of something; every country is afraid of some other country. Hundreds of millions all over the world live under some kind of suspended sentence of...