Waiting for the End? Prospects for Nuclear Destuction

The bellicose nationalism of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and his insistence on the need for “nuclear superiority” help explain the interest stirred by Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth when it first began to appear in the New Yorker. The book along with news of the European antinuclear movement has probably helped rally, in turn, antinuclear sentiment in this country. For those involved in the movement here Solly Zuckerman’s book, though it arrived with less fanfare, should be of considerable interest. Zuckerman, a leading British scientific adviser to the Macmillan and Wilson governments of the ’60s, writes with admirable brevity about matters of immediate political relevance, bu...