Word: schelle
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...years, along comes a publishing sensation that is much more than just another bestseller. Usually it is a book that manages, by a combination of good timing and fresh, forceful presentation, to speak for, as well as to, a large segment of society on a serious subject. Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, still two weeks away from its official publication date, is already just such a highbrow blockbuster. This erudite yet passionate treatise on the danger of nuclear war attracted widespread attention when it first appeared two months ago in three successive issues...
...Schell spent nearly five years putting himself through an intensive course of reading and interviews on various aspects of nuclear war. To summarize and synthesize what passes for expertise on the subject, he drew on a wide range of sources: theorists who specialize in this modern-day branch of eschatology, like the Hudson Institute's Herman Kahn (who wrote a book of his own 20 years ago, Thinking About the Unthinkable); physicists who explain how the bomb works; military men who explain how it might be used; and physicians and other scientists who speculate on what might happen when...
That conclusion is not shared by all the experts on whom Schell relies in building his argument. Moreover, many of those who agree with Schell have been making much the same point for a long time. So the thesis is neither indisputable nor original. But Schell makes his case with a combination of rigor, intensity and boldness that is all too rare in expositions of nuclear...
...bedevil the Joint Chiefs of Staff as they design "targeting options" and President Reagan as he seeks to make credible the longstanding American threat of using nuclear weapons first to retaliate against a Soviet tank attack on Western Europe. But those uncertainties also complicate the arguments of people like Schell, who maintain that nuclear weaponry, because it threatens total destruction, is devoid of military or political utility. Whether one believes that nuclear arsenals constitute an indispensable part of our national defense or that they constitute the ultimate threat to our survival, the fact remains that nobody knows what would happen...
...Schell acknowledges this in a neat and compelling conclusion to the first section of his book: "Once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though...