The Fate of the Earth

The Yale University sociologist Kai T. Erikson, reviewing the book in The New York Times, wrote, “This is a work of enormous force. There are moments when it seems to hurtle, almost out of control, across an extraordinary range of fact and thought. But in the end, it accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in the 37 years of the nuclear age. It compels us - and compel is the right word - to confront head on the nuclear peril in which we all find ourselves. In some regards, it is tempting to treat Jonathan Schell's achievement as an event of profound historical moment rather than as a book.”[3]

Professor Erikson went on: “Throughout the whole of this marvelous work, Schell is vulnerable to charges of an almost romantic simplicity of vision—a risk that he, a seasoned observer of the human scene, must have known he was taking. This may be the price one has to pay for the attempt to enlarge perspectives and to turn away from 'crusted and hardened patterns of thought and feeling.’”[4]

In an unpublished review of The Fate of the Earth, the social scientist Brian Martin was skeptical of Schell's conclusions, positing that the author's argument that "most people" would die in the nuclear war was exaggerated, especially for the Global South. Martin wrote: "The perplexity is explained by Schell's process of continually taking worst interpretations and bending the evidence to give the worst impression. And usually when he spells out a worst case as a possibility—for example… a 10,000 Mt attack on the United States—this becomes implicitly a certainty for later discussion, with qualifications dropped."[5]

In the book, Schell appeared to have anticipated such criticism. "To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation—just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out," he wrote. "To begin with, we know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur, the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use all their weapons, the global effects, in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are not moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand them without breaking down catastrophically". (pp. 93-94.)

More generally, Schell's analysis of the effects of a full-scale nuclear exchange proceeds from a stance of cognitive modesty: "In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we stand before a mystery, and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We are in deep ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without delay to withdraw the threat we now pose to the earth and to ourselves." (p.95)

• In the 1985 Infocom interactive fiction game A Mind Forever Voyaging, The Fate of the Earth is on the list of banned books, tapes, and programs issued by the Morality Bureau of the government in Rockvil's Main Library in the 2071 simulation.

• List of books about nuclear issues
• On Nuclear Terrorism
• Nuclear winter

• The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell