Fr Arrupe's reflections are profound, moving and modern. They are also significant and practical. He is very much a contemporary man; a witness to the atomic age with all its possibilities of achievement and progress; an eye-witness in Japan to part of its record of awesome destructiveness. In 1942 Fr Arrupe became Rector at the Jesuit house at Hiroshima and he was able to use his earlier medical training when the atom bomb fell on the city in August 1945. He was elected twenty-eighth General of the Society of Jesus in May 1965 and was the first Basque since St Ignatius Loyola to hold that ofice.