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all powers within reach of our persuasion that they should
immediately abolish their nuclear arsenals? I know several people
who say they came to this conclusion after reading
The Fate of the
Earth,
but I suspect that they had long been inclined to it.
There is a value nevertheless in describing the worst that might
possibly happen even if it is far from probable . George Orwell did
this in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
though he envisaged a ghastly future
rather than none at all . Unlike Schell he presented his vision in
fictional form, yet he was compelled in the few months between the
publication of the novel and his death to issue public statements
insisting that the book was a warning not a prophecy and certainly
not an attack on the British Socialists then in office; in the 1950s,
Orwell's friends and admirers were often driven to defend his novel
against being misrepresented as essentially cold war propaganda or
even a brief for preventive war against the Soviet Union .
By contrast, when Schell turns to critiquing deterrence and
advocating an alternative to it , he blurs the line between the
admonitory illustration of a possible catastrophe and treating it as a
likely, even probable, eventuality. In the first two sections of
The Fate
ofthe Earth,
his purpose is to describe in gruesome detail a devastated
postnuclear United States independently of whatever sequence of
events may have led to a nuclear attack on the nation . Suddenly, he
switches in the final section to the assumption that the destruction of
America is the result of a Soviet first strike in order to argue that the
devastation makes the retaliatory second strike of deterrence theory
irrational and incredible . He writes:
We have only to picture the circumstances of leaders whose
country has just been annihilated in a first strike . Now their
country is on its way to becoming a radioactive desert , but the
retaliatory nuclear force survives in its silos, bombers, and
submarines. These leaders of nobody, living in underground
shelters or in "doomsday" planes that could not land, would
possess the means of national defense but no nation to defend.
What rational purpose could they have in launching the
retaliatory strike?
But why would the leaders of the Soviet Union, or for that
matter of the United States, want to launch a totally destructive first
strike (assuming its possibility) rather than one on military or
"counterforce" targets, such as the silos and bombers that constitute
a second-strike capacity? They would have to be crazy to do so .
