Word: schell
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...kill millions of innocent men, women, and children, and possibly destroy the world, because the Soviet Union lobbed a few hundred-megaton nuclear warheads on the fair old U.S. of A.? The question is, of course, heavily loaded; and answering 'no' is crucial to coming to terms with Jonathan Schell's latest epistle. The Abolition...
Asking, "Do you dare?" is more than an exercise in Alan Alda Yuppiedom: it lies at the crux of deterrence theory, a theory that Schell painstakingly and convincingly shows is as out-of-date as John Wayne machismo...
...Yorker Writer Jonathan Schell sets out from the moralist camp and Physicist Freeman Dyson from the rationalist camp in search of common ground...
Both see the current balance of terror-"offense-dominated nuclear deterrence"-as the moral equivalent of slavery and call for its abolition. Hence the 19th century resonance of Schell's title, The Abolition, and Dyson's description of the nuclear arsenal in Weapons and Hope as "a manifestly evil institution deeply embedded in the structure of our society." Hence also the common weakness in their arguments: slavery, whatever it may have meant to the economy and social order of nations, had little to do with their security; nuclear weapons, however perverse the argument for having them, are intimately...
Both books first appeared as lengthy serializations in The New Yorker at the beginning of the year. Schell's is a sequel to his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth. That work received widespread praise for its passionate, sometimes overwrought meditation on the madness of mutual assured destruction (MAD). Schell argued that the apocalyptic nature of nuclear war had rendered obsolete not only war itself but the concept of national sovereignty. He called on the superpowers to eliminate nuclear weapons and to "reinvent politics" by creating a world government loosely based on the pacifist ideals of Mahatma Gandhi...