IIRC, Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski wrote a pair of novels with that theme. New civilization breaks radio silence, within short order gets a relativistic kinetic ZAP. The universe ends up with a bunch of civilizations each keep a very low profile.
Personally, I suspect they're not out there.
I suspect they're out there, that they are very rare and separated in space and time. The next few decades of study of places in our own Solar System such as Europa and Mars will give us a clue if life is common out there. And large next-generation spaceborne telescopes might show life signs such as spectroscopy of free oxygen etc. in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. However, there's no reason that intelligence is some sort of goal or end-game for evolution.
And my views on exponential technological growth and the potential for technological singularity are pretty well known here. So I suspect that any species that "makes it" moves beyond paradigms of resource exploitation or any desire to communicate peacefully, or destroy another civilization.
The transmitting time for a civilization is probably very brief as compared to the distances separating civilizations. Despite how the claims that "I Love Lucy" is going on out there FOREVARRRRR.... etc. it's not true. Inverse square law is a bitch, and the frequency is not optimized for long distance space propagation. A civilization that built dish antennae the size of planets still could not detect us much beyond a few hundred light years.
Unless species are packed in and crowded like in Star Wars or Star Trek, you'd have to build a Dyson Sphere surrounding a star, convert most all the energy intercepted into radio at the 12cm Hydrogen "water hole" that's best for interstellar communication, and leave it running for thousands... millions of years to have a decent chance of being picked up by another civilization.
And I agree with Ron. Hawking's brilliance with physics and mathematics does not automatically translate to other things. And as far as the relativistic weaponry horror story with the evil game-theory basis of "it's the only way to be safe/sure", the problem is that if races are in such close contact and similar technological levels, the odds of some third race seeing what you're doing are pretty good, then making the aggressor race vulnerable, and with PROOF they're DEFINITELY a threat, instead of just "maybe" a threat by virtue of possessing technology/spaceflight.