A Grim Manifesto on Nuclear War

By Strobe Talbott

The Fate of the Earth: powerful but flawed

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 used; 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 then-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 superpowers 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 action 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) dismisses 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 rulers 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 lose 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 in 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, than 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 the 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 softheadedness. 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

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