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Exactly that sweeping solution-and a worldwide government of unspecified political complexion to carry it out-is the immodest proposal of the antinuclear movement's rallying point, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth. The book first appeared as three articles in The New Yorker and met wide acclaim among opinion leaders. Walter Cronkite said it "may be one of the most important works of recent years." Washington Post Columnist Mary McGrory said that the book was "working its way into the national psyche." Even journalists who disagreed with Schell's call for disarmament, like Columnist...
...growing number of commentators are now skeptical. In the May issue of Harper's, Editor Michael Kinsley writes: "Schell's . . . pretentious . . . essay well illustrates the confusion of the antinuclear movement." The heart of Kinsley's argument is that Schell too readily subordinates "liberty," "national sovereignty" and other values to "survival," because the only possible outcomes he sees to nuclear confrontation are annihilation or peace at any price. Contends Kinsley: "To Schell, apparently, all considerations apart from the danger of nuclear war are mere distractions...
Syndicated Columnist Max Lerner, in a sternly critical review in a stronghold of Democratic liberalism, the New Republic, complains that Schell's logic could be used to justify "certain surrender [through] unilateral disarmament by the West." The New York Times editorial page, another traditionally liberal forum, has faulted Schell for utopianism. "The rest of us," the paper notes, "are left in the real world, stuck with the only available alternative to catastrophe. Deterrence it will have to be." Times Book Critic John Leonard, a one-time liberal activist on issues ranging from the Viet Nam War to the Helsinki...
...issue of the world's ever-increasing nuclear arsenal has captured the hearts--and minds--of America. The give-and-take started in Vermont, where 161 towns so far this year have endorsed a nuclear freeze. It continued when the New Yorker published in three successive issues Jonathan Schell's apocalyptic The Fate of the Earth. It escalated when The New Republic responded to Schell by featuring a piece "in defense of deterrence." It spread further with a Newsweek cover story. And it evolved all out of control with an ABC Nightline special edition live from Harvard's Kennedy School...
...largely because of where it appeared. But other instant bestsellers born in the stately columns of The New Yorker have survived as masterpieces of modern journalism, such as Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring, a catalyst for the environmental movement, and John Hersey's Hiroshima. While Schell's book does not live up to Shawn's reverent assessment, and while it falters in its attempt to grapple with some aspects of the awful subject it addresses, The Fate of the Earth is a grim but riveting amplification of Hersey's pioneering introduction to that subject...