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

by Jonathan Schell

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.

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 1998

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna]

Amazone

Devastating critique, depressingly implausible solutions
4/10

Schell argues that nuclear proliferation can be reversed, the doctrine of deterrence abandoned, and multilateral treaties negotiated for total nuclear disarmament. If not, we face a horrifying future where a policy of "well-managed nuclear proliferation" leads inevitably to a catastrophic "normalization" and "universalization" of nuclear weaponry.

Schell's grasp of the stunning illogic of deterrence is, as usual, ethically, politically, and strategically nuanced.

But can abolition really happen? To almost everyone in the Cold War nuclear policy establishment, abolition was unthinkable in practice and unattractive as an ideal.

The crucial issue is exactly what has changed since 1991. To investigate this, Schell includes twenty interviews with political, military, scientific, and intellectual leaders of the Cold War, most of whom contributed centrally to their nations' preparations for nuclear war. Interesting though they are, these interviews are shallow.

The political and military men seem most concerned with the public relations value of a trendy remorse, and very few interviewees make any substantive suggestions for exiting the slippery slope leading to a horrendous new era of nuclear warfare.

Schell's own description of a pathway to abolition is vague and implausible. What he really is selling is a naive optimism that humanity will rise to the world-historical occasion. Alas, Schell's persuasive vision of the dangers we face makes it abundantly clear that such optimism is an intolerable self-indulgence.

Andrew N. Carpenter

---

While baby boomers make their plans for those looming retirement years and take pride in their IRAs, Jonathan Schell wants to pull us yet again from complacency and self-absorption. But hasn't the fate of the Earth, well, you know, blown over? What new news about the necessity of nuclear disarmament can Schell bring?

The gist of his long introductory argument is this: since nuclear weapons proliferated in order to face down Communism, and since Communism has been faced down, and since the U.S. and Russia are, presumably, pals, isn't it time to dissolve the arsenals?

Decency cries out, "Yes!" But, he writes, "the nuclear policies of the Clinton administration have been both tentative and vague, and their articulation mainly left to lower-level officials." This upsets Schell. As does the egregious fact that deterrence is still the policy mainstay. "In the words of Bruce Blair, of the Brookings Institution, 'No major change in the U.S.-Russian nuclear equation has occurred, not in war planning, not in daily alert practices, not in strategic arms control, and maybe not even in core attitudes.'" Schell is upset, but who is going to listen?

It's never entirely clear what facts, what hard news has unleashed Schell's passions. When he writes, for example, "gone [are] the obstacles to inspection that have been considered the main brake on nuclear disarmament," one wonders where he was when the stories on the stalled attempts at inspection in North Korea and Iraq aired. Perhaps he does not own a radio? Such discrepant statements make the reader querulous and grumpy.

The Gift of Time is nothing less than a cry for the abolition of nuclear weapons throughout the world. Schell is peeved that this has only been a whisper in the Clinton agenda, while outmoded policies and vague planning reveal the stronger belief in abolition's undesirability.

Schell illustrates this fork-tongued approach to the crafting of nuclear policy by citing the testimony of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Walter B. Slocombe, quoted as saying that the U.S. would like to pursue a negotiated reduction of nuclear arms but can't, because other countries are unlikely to embrace disarmament. Schell finds this argument absurd, an admission that the goal can be achieved, but no one really wants it. He concludes, "The fear of breakout animates all those who wish to retain nuclear weapons indefinitely," as if such a fear itself had no basis in reality.

If his book were, instead, the collection of the interviews that follow, the reader might embrace Schell's thesis with less belligerent equivocation. He has talked with an impressive group of leading nuclear policymakers during the cold war, who have made stunning ideological reversals.

Included are General Charles Horner (air force commander), whose 1994 quote, "The nuclear weapon is obsolete; I want to get rid of them all," stunned officials in D.C. (he's now on the steering committee of the Stimson Center's Project on Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction); Robert McNamara, "one of the quintessential men of the Cold War" and crafter of the Vietnam War, whose last vision is of a nonnuclear world; Joseph Rotblat, the Manhattan Project scientist who resigned eight months before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the only scientist who quit the project on ethical grounds; and many others. The section "European Voices" includes a talk with, among others, Helmut Schmidt; "Russia" includes an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev.

A contentious read, The Gift of Time will animate and annoy. After all, Schell purports to yank ours heads from the sands of denial, but he seems to try with such pap as, "Our primary inspiration for attending to the nuclear question ... should not be fear but fear's opposites, hope and faith, hope that, in the transformed and brightened political scene, the goal of abolition is achievable, and faith that we possess the nerve, stamina, and wisdom to reach it." What "we" will set aside the security, however bogus, derived from nuclear arsenals in favor of some hope-based, fuzzy "should"?

Hollis Giammatteo

---

Library Journal
Longtime New Yorker writer Schell, best known for his landmark polemic The Fate of the Earth, 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.

[Eric Phetteplace]

The Gift of Time has value but isn't quite what I was hoping for. Schell goes about arguing for the abolition of nuclear weapons by conversing with figures in U.S., Russian, & European militaries/politics. That's interesting in that you get a diverse range of views which highlights commonalities & the areas where we still struggle to achieve consensus (e.g. the idea of really reducing arsenals to zero was still pretty problematic to many of the abolition-leaning people in the book). It also makes the book intensely practical. On the other hand, it's fairly repetitive as different people say the same or extremely similar things, while opportunities for rigorous criticism are missed. I was more interested in the theory of abolition & thus might've been better off with Schell's The Fate of the Earth. It's also a failure that people who are steadfastly opposed to abolition aren't interviewed, as their opinions would create greater debate than the opinions of people who all more or less agree that nuclear weapons have outlived their usefulness.