Time Essay: How to Defuse the Population Bomb

World population growth—and how to slow it—continues to be a subject of great controversy. The planet's poorest nations have yet to find effective ways to check their population increase—at least without restricting citizens' rights and violating such traditions as the custom of having large families as insurance in old age. India's new government, for example, has abandoned coercive birth control procedures, even though the country, with a population of 635 million, is growing by a million new people per month. The U.S. National Security Council has said that runaway population growth is "a threat to our national security. " Nonetheless, some...