The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now - Hardcover

Schell, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805059601 ISBN 13: 9780805059601

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 1998

Synopsis

From the author of The Fate of the Earth, a stirring new call to the nuclear age.

When Jonathan Schell's monumental best-seller The Fate of the Earth was published in 1981, it was hailed by The New York Times as "an event of profound historical importance." Harrison Salisbury called it "the most important book of the decade."Now Schell has produced a work of equal--or greater--historical significance and literary accomplishment. Just as The Fate of the Earth became the seminal volume of the Cold War era, The Gift of Time is destined to become the same for our age. In a series of conversations with officials as diverse as Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and the last commander of the Strategic Command, General George Lee Butler, Schell finds support for the abolition of nuclear weapons in the unlikeliest places, among the very generals and politicians who presided over nuclear strategy and its implementation during the Cold War.

Writing in a spirit of optimism and hope, Schell calls upon all Americans--indeed, all of the world's citizens--to snap out of our cold-war trance, this forced cohabitation with horror, and take the step that alone can free us from nuclear danger and corruption, namely the abolition of nuclear weapons.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Schell is one of the major American thinkers of our time. A New Yorker writer for more than two decades, Schell is the author of eight books, including the best-selling The Fate of the Earth and The Time of Illusion. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[The Gift of Time] is more disjointed and less lapidary than his earlier The Fate of the Earth. Nonetheless, he has produced a readable and interesting excursion through such problems as cutting numbers, taking weapons off alert status, defining what zero really means when knowledge of how to make weapons cannot be disinvented, and figuring out how to respond if a nation cheats and breaks out of the nuclear-abolition treaty.

The gift of time-time propitious for reaching an international agreement to abolish nuclear weapons-comes from the end of the cold war. Schell presents his argument in his own words and in interviews he had with several prominent men who were once engaged in framing nuclear policy and planning nuclear war-among them Robert S. McNamara and Mikhail S. Gorbachev. He also states clearly the counterargument that nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented and that policing the agreement would require that we have "a verification regime of extraordinary rigor and intrusiveness." Schell frames the debate in these terms: "Was the nuclear buildup a story of wise management of a terrible dilemma that had no other solution? And was it, further, a fortuitous training session, in which the world was introduced to the previously unsuspected virtues of nuclear arms? Or was it a tale of the reckless endangerment of mankind? If the first is true, then nuclear weapons are a marvelous gift of proven worth to the world. If the latter is true, then abolishing nuclear weapons is the unfinished business of the end of the Cold War. In the first case, we cannot do without them. In the second, we must get rid of them." Schell argues the second case eloquently and asserts that "it is possible, if only we can muster the political will, to free the world of nuclear danger."

Longtime New Yorker writer Schell, best known for his landmark polemic The Fate of the Earth (LJ 4/15/82), revisits the issue of nuclear annihilation in this important new book. Concerned about the still-lingering threat of nuclear confrontation, Schell has assembled impressive testimony against nuclear weapons from a variety of former Cold Warriors, among them Robert McNamara, Fred Ikle, Alan Cranston, and Gen. Charles Horner. He includes the views of European policymakers, most prominently Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Schmidt. However, the most effective chapter of the book is an in-depth conversation with Gen. George Lee Butler, former commander of the Strategic Air Command, who eloquently explains his conversion to nuclear abolition and concludes that "There is no security found in nuclear weapons. It's a fool's game." Like Schell's earlier works, this will be in high demand in most libraries. Highly recommended.?Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805059601
• ISBN 13: 9780805059601
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256