DENNIS WRONG
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broken windows hundreds of miles from the site of a bomb exploded
above Manhattan to the disintegration of the life-sustaining ozone
layer surrounding the earth. The second part examines the moral
and philosophical implications of the elimination of all future
generations as well as the living, quoting a large number of certified
sages from Aristotle to Arendt, Socrates to Solzhenitsyn. The last
section of the book, considerably shorter than the other two, tells us
what we must do to save ourselves: The unprecedented threat of
total annihilation can only be met with total innovation, a
"reinvention of the world" that abolishes sovereign states, the
creators of war, by instituting world government. Schell proposes
this after first rejecting the adequacy of continuing to rely on the
mutual deterrence that has preserved an uneasy peace for the past
thirty-eight years.
It
will be a long time before anyone surpasses Schell's
description of the worst imaginable destruction that nuclear war
might wreak. Blast, firestorms, radiation, dispersed radioactive
fallout, the collapse of medical and economic facilities to support
survivors , ensuing epidemics and starvation, genetic damage, the
deterioration of animal and plant life, the depletion of the ozone
layer that ensures the" habitability of the earth" -the death-dealing
effects of all of these are concretely enumerated. Schell dwells at
length on the damage to the ecosphere, largely, it appears, in order
to sustain his overriding claim that all-out nuclear war might leave
no survivors. Critics have pointed out that several of his own
authorities have explicitly denied this claim, as have vigorous
opponents of the arms race such as Zuckerman. Since we were
warned not so long ago of the weakening of the ozone layer by
spray-can deodorants and supersonic jet planes, one is readily
persuaded that nuclear bombs would do it even greater harm.
Yet Schell's reliance on the language and imagery of the
environmentalist movement in itself arouses skepticism. Recalling
the hyperbole of recent ecological militants , it becomes easier to
assimilate Schell's ultimatism to previous modes of suburban uplift
or to the familiar spirit of
New Yorker
pastorale. That journal's last
effort to redeem us also took a conservationist slogan as a titular
metaphor: "The Greening of America."
Schell's first section is entitled "A Republic of Insects and
Grass," which inappropriately evokes a meadow on a summer day
rather than the blasted postnuclear American landscape he wants us
to imagine . Why, for that matter, the "fate ofthe earth" rather than
