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of humanity or mankind? Schell' s choice of title may reflect his
expressed wish to bring together the antinuclear and environ–
mentalist movements. The former, he contends, " now stands in
eerie seclusion from the rest of life" whereas the latter "at times
assumes an almost misanthropic posture, as though man were an
unwanted intruder in an otherwise .unblemished natural world."
The argument sounds a bit tactical at this point. Someone told me
recently that many members of the Audubon Society were joining
the peace movement because it had dawned on them that nuclear
war threatened birds , leading me to wonder whether I would want a
child of mine to marry anyone who became alarmed over the
nuclear danger only on realizing that it might hurt the red-breasted
nuthatch. But there certainly are clear affinities between the
technological diabolism of the antinuclear protesters and that of the
ecological movement, which have even produced a new political
party in West Germany. The extinction of humanity, however, is
Schell' s major theme, though he concedes a large measure of
uncertainty to his estimates of ecological damage in comparison with
the direct effects of nuclear explosions. Yet he mentions only in
passing the risks of nuclear proliferation, of a possible succession of
territorially confined nuclear wars, and concentrates almost
exclusively on all-out war between the superpowers .
Schell's reflections on the death of the species are so insistent
on the wrong done to the unborn, those who will never have a
chance to live at all, as to recall the rhetoric of another contemporary
movement: the opponents of abortion . Schell takes pains to
underline the difference between the unlived lives of millions of
people and the "radical nothingness" of obliterating any human
future whatever for anyone. Inmates of the Nazi and Soviet camps,
he notes, were motivated to escape or survive in order to bear
witness, anticipating the future judgment of a history, which would
come to an end in the event of a total nuclear holocaust . But Schell
dwells so obsessively on this theme that one begins to think,
irrelevantly from his standpoint, of Noah's Ark solutions. Why not
ship off a few selected potential survivors to Tristan da Cunha,
Ladakh, or remote underground caverns equipped with historical
records of our civilization and cultural artifacts of both practical and
symbolic value, excluding, of course, textbooks on modern physics?
More important, does not Schell so absolutize the value of sheer
survival as to make acceptable-though he specifically denies this
intention-surrender to the Russians or at least an effort to convince
