The abolition /

Following up on his best-selling The Fate of the Earth, Schell moves toward a proposal for abolishing nuclear weapons. To that end, he takes a more benign view of two things he seemed to reject before: deterrence theory and the nation state. The advent of nuclear weapons has led to what Schell calls ""the deterred state,"" which is a kind of political stalemate. This is not a bad thing, he believes, if a way can be found to maintain the stalemate while eliminating the weapons; the political conditions would remain the same, in other words, minus the threat of mutual annihilation--or threat of self-annihilation--that has, in fact, produced stability. Deterrence theory, the idea that nuclear weapons could make the world less dangerous, was meant initially to be a short-term strategy providing stability while a solution to nuclear weapons could be worked out. Instead, it became the theoretical basis for the arms race--with the fatal flaw of not telling what to do if deterrence fails. In the long run, then, it is no more satisfactory than the newer fantasies of winnable nuclear war. Schell's proposal is to negotiate an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, while maintaining the capability to manufacture the weapons--coupled with an effective build-up of conventional defensive forces. The threat of nuclear weapons, he reasons, would still work as a deterrent; but if the deterrent failed and one power began manufacturing nuclear weapons, triggering a response by the other(s), there would be time to find a resolution to the conflict. (How much time would be a matter of negotiating how far clown the stepladder of manufacturing to deployment the abolition agreement would go.) In the absence of nuclear weapons, defensive weapons would in fact be defensive, giving each nation state the security it desires. Schell's argument suffers some of the same weaknesses as Fate of the Earth: he wanders, musing on the meaning of human extinction; and he's repetitive, even in a short essay. But the movement is toward the kind of defensive thinking exemplified by Freeman Dyson in Weapons and Hope; and while Schell's hopes still have an air of unreality about them, they are an important move beyond simply registering fear (as in Caldicott, above) or coolly assessing models (as in Fischer, also above). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.