Books: Arguments Against MADness

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THE ABOLITION by Jonathan Schell; Knopf; 173 pages; $11.95

WEAPONS AND HOPE by Freeman Dyson; Harper & Row; 334 pages; $17.95

There are now approximately 50,000 nuclear weapons. They have brought the world to a state of critical mass: the detonation of one bomb or warhead could touch off a chain reaction leading to the extinction of the human race. For a fact of life—the existence of those weapons—to be so bound up with the possibility of the death of the planet is an affront to reason and conscience alike.

Some of the best minds of the age have tried to rationalize their way around this ghastly paradox: the reliance of the human race for its safety on the instruments of its own destruction.

The leaders of the U.S. have made a policy of that paradox. It is called deterrence: if our enemy believes we will use our nukes against him, he will not use his against us. The Kremlin operates on a similar principle.

The superpowers hold pistols to each other's heads; they forgo large-scale defenses to make their suicide pact more credible, but they continue to proliferate and refine their offensive weapons. In so doing they put their arsenals on hair trigger; the danger grows that in a crisis or an accident, one or both fingers could twitch.

Many thinkers have recoiled from the logic underlying such a precarious peace. Instead of reconciling themselves to the existence of nuclear weapons, they call for their elimination, often in quasi-religious terms. But they have yet to come up with plausible proposals about how to achieve salvation.

New 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 connected with national security.

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. His message was ultimately defeatist: unless the world took his vaguely defined and wildly Utopian advice, it was doomed.