Nuclear Noose

...Naturally, there is a heavy emphasis on the medical effects of nuclear weapons, but there are also papers dealing with the psychology and the economics of the arms race, with the makeup of the American and Soviet arsenals, and with the international movement for disarmament...

...Despite Schell's habit of treating the hard-earned wisdom of the disarmament movement as his personal discovery, despite his tendency to emphasize moral and philosophical arguments and to ignore political and psychological analysis, The Fate of the Earth is valuable simply because it greatly enlarges the circle of concerned readers...

...This peril is categorically new, because it promises not just a personal death for each of us, but a collective death, an end to all human enterprise: "Up to now, every risk has been contained within the frame of life...

...Since Zuckerman served as chief science adviser to several British governments, and has studied the strategies worked out by NATO planners, he is in a good position to judge the issue...

...From the beginning, those who work there have been isolated both geographically and psychologically...

...Millions of people have looked up from the puddles at their feet to see the noose waiting just a few paces ahead, and they are coming together to dismantle the gallows...

...If such a war ever breaks out, all our business will come to nought, and so very likely will civilization, and so perhaps will all the higher forms of life on Earth...

...extinction would shatter the frame...

...and they have been publicized for years by organizations such as Friends of the Earth, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the United Nations...

...In the early 1960s, some American physicians, alarmed about the dangers of fallout, formed a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility to work for the test ban treaty...

...Beginning with the NATO decision in 1979 to deploy a new generation of weapons in Europe, and spurred on by recurrent pronouncements from the Reagan Administration about "limited" and "winnable" nuclear wars, however, a mass movement for nuclear disarmament has arisen on both sides of the Atlantic...

...We can see men and women at work constructing that irrational foundation in Nuclear Culture, Paul Loeb's study of life on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state...

...The papers gathered from those symposia are collected in The Final Epidemic...

...NUCLEAR CULTURE: LIVING AND WORKING IN THE WORLD'S LARGEST ATOMIC COMPLEX by Paul Loeb Coward, McCann & Geoghegan...

...The most widely heralded and in some respects the most important of these recent studies is Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth...

...Drawing upon interviews, training manuals, and his own powers of observation, Loeb presents a chilling portrait of this "reservation," where the makings of a global holocaust accumulate hour-by-hour...

...Forty titles dealing with one or another aspect of the nuclear threat have already been announced for 1982 publication...

...According to Solly Zuckerman in Nuclear Illusion and Reality, nuclear weapons of mass destruction make no more sense militarily than they do medically...

...Originally addressed to a medical audience, these lectures are well-documented, carefully reasoned, with little appeal to ideology or sentiment...

...After some years of quiescence, the group has recently been revitalized under the leadership of Helen Caldicott, and, in symposia put on in cities throughout the country, has undertaken a campaign to educate physicians and the general public about the medical consequences of nuclear war...

...Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of hanging in the morning, Samuel Johnson once quipped...

...Since 1945, many thoughtful people have understood as much, and have spoken out eloquently in books, songs, speeches, marches...

...Only moments away from hanging, the man worries about his shoes...

...NUCLEAR ILLUSION AND REALITY by Solly Zuckerman Viking Press...

...In this review and in a second installment to appear in a later issue of The Progressive, I will briefly survey this burgeoning literature of warning and hope...

...4.95 paperback...

...In Loeb's absorbing account, they appear, with few exceptions, to be wholly indifferent to the implications of their work—for them manufacturing plutonium has become as routine as making aluminum or steel...

...Specialists may argue about whether the ecosphere would in fact collapse, yet we dare not experiment to see which side is right, for "we are not in possession of any spare earths that we might blow up...

...13.95...

...255 pp...

...They cannot be regarded as "a rational extension of conventional armaments," simply because their use, no matter how "limited" at the outset, would almost certainly lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange, which would obliterate both sides in the conflict and render moot whatever quarrel had prompted a war to begin with...

...Sandwiched between ads for jewelry, resorts, and $18,000 automobiles, Schell's sober essays originally appeared this past February in three issues of The New Yorker...

...At risk, he maintains,^ not just a particular social system, but "the habitability of the Earth...

...Schell's formulation of the nuclear danger has provoked widespread discussion in part because it appears at the moment when so many of our fellow citizens are gazing up from the puddles underfoot to the gallows ahead, in part because, through its publication in The New Yorker, it has reached a wider, and generally more comfortable, audience...

...Both the warnings and the possible solutions have been published in magazines such as The Progressive and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...

...He traces the driving impetus behind the arms race not to the government or military, but to the scientists and technicians who relentlessly pursue their murderous research: "The men in the nuclear weapons laboratories of both sides have succeeded in creating a world with an irrational foundation, on which a new set of political realities has in turn had to be built...

...Touching briefly on matters ranging from art to sex, from drugs to marriage, he suggests that our collective nihilism, our cult of the immediate, and our spectacular waste are all reactions to a sense of nuclear peril...

...Originally established to manufacture plutonium during World War II, to fuel the Nagasaki bomb, Hanford continues to produce 60 per cent of all American plutonium, to store vast amounts of radioactive wastes, and to buttress the swaying nuclear power industry...

...That image often comes to mind when my friends declare themselves too busy with other matters to concern themselves with the threat of nuclear war...

...yet they are fully accessible to lay readers...

...10.95...

...Schell outlines the fundamental choice confronting us: whether to cling to or reject the dogma of national sovereignty, power politics, and militarism which has led us to the brink of annihilation...

...151 pp...

...It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purposes would be drowned for all time...

...in books such as Sidney Lens's The Day Before Doomsday (1977) and Nigel Calder's Nuclear Nightmares (1979...

...in order to discover their tolerance of nuclear holocausts...

...Yet because these critics of the nuclear arms race have always been a small minority, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union have been able to ignore them...

...One sign of this ferment is the recent spate of books on the topic...

...THE FINAL EPIDEMIC: PHYSICIANS AND SCIENTISTS ON NUCLEAR WAR edited by Ruth Adams and Susan Cullen Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 254 pp...

...In one of his essays, George Orwell tells about watching a condemned man on the way to the gallows walk around a mud puddle to avoid wetting his feet...

...We must lay down our arms," he concludes, "relinquish sovereignty, and found a political system for the peaceful settlement of international disputes...

...Unfortunately, although we all live under a threat of execution, we have been slow in focusing our thoughts and our wills on the one vital thing—elimination of nuclear weapons...

...Scott Sanders (Scott Sanders is a novelist, essayist, and professor of English at Indiana University...

...The Final Epidemic combines scientific precision with moral vision...

...In this brief study he argues cogently that nuclear armaments decrease, rather than increase, our security...

...He graphically describes the effects of a nuclear war on a single city, on a, nation, and on the ecosphere...

...Schell examines the cultural influences of extinction...