Second Thoughts on Schell

After a rush of praise, his antinuclear book draws skepticism

Few issues covered by the nation's press are as emotional as the effect of nuclear weapons in causing or averting war. Once reporters begin, as many find it irresistible to do, by evoking images of a fiery doomsday, it is hard to shift readers' attention to cold-eyed consideration of deterrence. The impulse in much of the public is simply to cry out for ridding the planet of such weapons.

Exactly that sweeping solution--and a worldwide government of unspecified political complexion to carry it out--is the immodest proposal of the antinuclear movement's rallying point, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth. The book first appeared as three articles in The New Yorker and met wide acclaim among opinion leaders. Walter Cronkite said it "may be one of the most important works of recent years." Washington Post Columnist Mary McGrory said that the book was "working its way into the national psyche." Even journalists who disagreed with Schell's call for disarmament, like Columnist James Reston of the New York Times, treated the book with respect because of its import for the antinuclear movement.

But a growing number of commentators are now skeptical. In the May issue of Harper's, Editor Michael Kinsley writes: "Schell's . . . pretentious . . . essay well illustrates the confusion of the antinuclear movement." The heart of Kinsley's argument is that Schell too readily subordinates "liberty," "national sovereignty" and other values to "survival," because the only possible outcomes he sees to nuclear confrontation are annihilation or peace at any price. Contends Kinsley: "To Schell, apparently, all considerations apart from the danger of nuclear war are mere distractions."

Syndicated Columnist Max Lerner, in a sternly critical review in a stronghold of Democratic liberalism, the New Republic, complains that Schell's logic could be used to justify "certain surrender [through] unilateral disarmament by the West." The New York Times editorial page, another traditionally liberal forum, has faulted Schell for utopianism. "The rest of us," the paper notes, "are left in the real world, stuck with the only available alternative to catastrophe. Deterrence it will have to be." Times Book Critic John Leonard, a one-time liberal activist on issues ranging from the Viet Nam War to the Helsinki human rights accords, is even more dismissive. He says that Schell "hasn't a clue" about the practical problems of disarmament and that his philosophizing "flirts with the preposterous."

More predictably, the right-leaning Wall Street Journal has lambasted Schell as "destructive of serious thought about how to prevent war and control the spread of nuclear arms." Especially ludicrous, the paper says, is his call for "nothing less than to reinvent politics." Cracks the Journal: "Like, wow, man."

Second thoughts notwithstanding, Schell's lofty polemic is the nonfiction sensation of the publishing season. It had an unusually large first printing of 50,000 copies, and another 75,000 copies are on the way to bookstores. The Book-of-the-Month Club has made The Fate of the Earth available to its 1.2 million members at bargain-basement rates: $2.25, more than $9 less than the list price. Such wide readership will no doubt sustain debate over nuclear weapons. And that is to the good--especially if readers remember that improving the fate of the earth requires hardheaded prescriptions, not just warnings of the Apocalypse.

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