TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82book

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 14.5 KB | 265 lines

                std                                                          April 19, 1982 

BOOKS

The Fate of the Earth:  Powerful but flawed

A Grim Manifesto on Nuclear War


Every few 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 of The New Yorker, where Schell is a
staff writer. The series immediately became the principal
manifesto for advocates of a nuclear-arms freeze, as well as an
inspiration for numerous speeches, lectures, editorials and
sermons. Alfred A. Knopf has already ordered a large second
printing of The Fate of the Earth and plans to have 75,000
copies on sale around the country by the end of the month. The
book promises to be the most influential and controversial of
the more than 100 books on nuclear war that have been pouring
onto the market since 1980.

The Book-of-the-Month Club is taking the unprecedented step of
offering The Fate of the Earth to its 1.2 million members at
minimal cost ($2.25 rather than the retail $11.95). After
feverish bidding, paperback rights went to Avon for $375,000 and
the book has already been snatched up by at least ten foreign
publishers.

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 uses; and physicians and other
scientists who speculate on what might happen when it is
exploded. Schell concludes that once a nuclear war broke out,
there would probably be no way to contain or limit it, much less
win it. The dynamic of spontaneous, irreversible escalation
would quickly destroy all the well-laid plans of the war games
and the "doctrines" of the political leaders, just as it would
destroy almost everything else--not just civilization, but much
of the ecosystem as well, sparing only certain lower orders of
flora and fauna that seem peculiarly able to survive in a
radio-active environment. Hence the title of the first of three
sections in the book:  "A Republic of Insects and Grass."

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 war.

Just as important, he recognizes that the critical but
irresolvable uncertainties inherent in the subject of nuclear
war cut two ways. They 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
in a nuclear war.

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 we knew for a certainty that their use would
put an end to our species."

That is precisely what Schell sets out to do in Chapter II,
"The Second Death."  Here Schell breaks new ground. Until now,
most of those who have thought either occasionally or
professionally about the unthinkable have tended to concentrate
on the impact that nuclear war might have on a city or a nation.
Schell looks beyond that particular horror to an even greater
one and ponders the awful finality itself. If the worst comes
true, after all, what more is there to think about? But Schell
looks beyond the end, as it were, into the void. "Death lies at
the core of each person's private existence, but part of death's
meaning is to be found in the fact that it occurs in a
biological and social world that survives."  Were that world to
perish, it would be "the second death"--the death of the
species, not just of the earth's population on doomsday, but of
countless unborn generations. They would be spared literal death
but would nonetheless be victims--in his view the most important
victims- -of a nuclear war.

In this eloquent chapter, Schell draws on ancient and modern
philosophy and theology--from socrates and the Bible to Karl
Jaspers and Alexander Solzhenitsyn--to support the second
premise of his book:  neither God nor man has yet decided what
"the fate of the earth" will be. "Since we have not made a
positive decision to exterminate ourselves but instead have
chosen to live on the edge of extinction, periodically lunging
toward the abyss only to draw back at the last second, our
situation is one of uncertainty and nervous insecurity rather
than of absolute hopelessness."  Man, in short, has a choice.

"The Choice" is the title of the third and final chapter of the
book. It is also by far the weakest part. As he must, Schell
faces up to the question of how mankind can get out of the
terrible dilemma that nuclear weapons represent. His analysis
of that dilemma is solid enough. He points out that despite all
the fancy refinements in the theory of nuclear deterrence over
the years, what it still comes down to is mutual assured
destruction; the super-powers are essentially still bound by a
suicide pact. "Nuclear deterrence begins by assuming, correctly,
that victory is impossible," Schell writes. "Thus, the logic of
the deterrence strategy is dissolved by the very event--the
first strike--that it is meant to prevent. Once the actin
begins, the whole doctrine is self-cancelling."  That much even
the President has implicitly acknowledged:  during his press
conference two weeks ago, he allowed that there would be no
winners, only losers, in a nuclear war. Reagan's partial
repudiation of his earlier talk about a limited and presumably
winnable nuclear war has come about in response to public
anxieties that Schell has articulated more effectively than any
other single figure in the current debate.

But Schell goes much further than simply endorsing a nuclear
freeze or urging a return to serious arms control. He regards
such remedies as little more than aspirins administered to a
patient with a life- threatening illness. In his view, the very
existence of nuclear weapons carries with it the unavoidable
possibility of their use, which in turn would very probably
topple us into the abyss; therefore nuclear weapons represent
an absolute evil, an ever present threat of total death embedded
in the political life of our planet. Insofar as our traditional
("pre-nuclear") notions of national security and sovereignty
depend on maintaining and threatening to use nuclear weapons,
those notions are obsolete and, more to the point, dangerous.
They must be recognized as such and discarded. Politics must be
reinvented:  existing institutions must give way to some sort of
transcendent sovereignty and security, presumably by a
government that embraces all mankind. Schell invokes love and
Mahatma Gandhi, appealing for a kind of international Gandhiism
to replace the system of nuclear-armed nation-states we now
have. How that noble ideal is to be accomplished, he does not
say. "I have left to others those awesome, urgent tasks, which,
imposed on us by history, constitute the political work of our
age."  Thanks a lot.

"Dreamlike and fantastic" is how Schell (correctly) dismissed
the prospect of a pre-emptive Soviet missile attack on the
U.S.'s supposedly vulnerable land forces. Unfortunately, the
same is true of his prescription for what ails mankind. If world
government is possible, it will almost certainly be a long time
coming--much longer than Schell's sense of urgency suggests we
have left.

Another weakness is that the book gives short shrift to Soviet-
American military balance and its political implications.
Gandhi's strategy of passive resistance was effective against
the British colonial rules of India, but it is hardly applicable
to the management of the Soviet challenge. Schell's position,
like many others', seems to be that with the Soviet-American
nuclear rivalry already at such grotesque levels of overkill,
concepts of rough equivalence, equilibrium and stability lost
all meaning. That proposition is highly debatable, yet Schell
seems almost to take it for granted. While balance of power may
be an old-fashioned idea, it can be argued to be all the more
valid now that power is nuclear. Precisely because these
arsenals must not be used, they must keep each other in check.
A gross imbalance, while it might not make war any less
suicidal, would create opportunities for the side with the
advantage to engage in bullying, blackmail, bluffing and
adventurism; thus it would raise the danger of a political
crisis turning into a military one, inadvertently but
catastrophically.

In fact, the whole political context in which the nuclear
dilemma has come about is largely missing Schell's book. He
obviously regards the threat and evil of nuclear war as so
immediate and so overwhelming that they eclipse all other
threats and evils, apparently including those embodied by the
Soviet system and Soviet behavior. The trouble with that line
of thinking is that it could lead some readers to the sort of
simple-minded defeatism summarized by the slogan "Better Red
than dead."  Better still to be neither Red nor dead, and that
too is a choice available to us. Yet that choice gets lost in
the apocalyptic musings and dire warnings of Schell's final
chapter. He seems to think that we are moving ever closer to the
brink, and only a radical reform of the world order will save
us.

It is worth recalling what Schell overlooks:  "brinksmanship"
was a feature of the Soviet-American contest in the '40s, '50s
and early '60s, over Berlin (twice), Cuba and other trouble
spots. That was back in the days when the U.S. had overwhelming
nuclear superiority. Since the Soviets achieved nuclear parity
with the U.S., and thus brought about the dilemma of true mutual
deterrence that Schell describes so well, the two countries have
tried to stay well back from the brink, despite the many points
of tension between them. In short, the choice facing mankind may
be less stark, and less simple, then the one Schell gives us
between Utopia and Armageddon.

The Fate of the Earth is occasionally repetitious, its prose
sometimes convoluted, and in a few passages Schell gratuitously
indulges in pet peeves and theories. For example, Schell--a
confirmed Nixon hater whose last book, The Time of Illusion, was
on Watergate--at one point suggests that Nixon could conceive
of detente with Soviet leaders partly because he and they shared
a contempt for human rights. Not only is this charge dubious,
to say the least, it is irrelevant to his thesis. Schell, like
any writer, needs a good editor.

But therein lies an irony. Schell has had one of the great
editors of our time:  William Shawn, the reclusive, brilliant,
sometimes quirky but certainly benevolent dictator for the past
30 years at The New Yorker. Shawn is not only Schell's boss but
his mentor as well. Insiders at the magazine believe that Shawn,
74, hopes that Schell, 38, will eventually succeed him--an idea
that has caused some resistance among the staff, partly because
Schell got a reputation as an overly emotional, "radic-lib"
opponent of the Viet Nam War. Shawn, however, has continued to
support him and was the godfather for The Fate of the Earth.
Shawn even provided, anonymously, promotional material for the
dust jacket of the book. From that telltale bit of evidence, we
learn that Shawn believes that this book "may someday be looked
back upon as a crucial event in the history of human thought."
 An editor in such awe of what his author and protege has
produced is likely to wield a very light pencil. And it shows.

The New Yorker has played a unique role in bringing serious,
although sometimes long-winded treatments of heavy subjects to
large audiences over the years. The magazine's mystique of
quality has rubbed off on even some of the more forgettable
works that have appeared there. Charles A. Reich's The Greening
of America, with its portentous celebration of teen-age
counterculture and its meditations on the existential
significance of bell-bottom jeans, was a tour de force of
soft-headedness. Yet it was also a spectacular critical and
commercial success when it appeared in 1970, 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 36 years ago.

--By Strobe Talbott