From the publisher: Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a key, and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the nature of evil as a point of departure, Jonathon Schell suggests that the essential story of the twentieth century was the gigantic development of humankind’s capacity for self-destruction — with the rise in many forms of “policies of extermination.”
Schell examines the legacy this leaves for the new millennium: the crisis of nuclear arms control that has arisen with the unravelling of the ABM treaty, the stalemate of the START talks, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Asia, and, perhaps, East Asia and the Middle-East. He suggests that the world now faces a stark choice between denuclearization, the abolition of all nuclear weapons, and full nuclearization, as the necessary technology and materials seep around the world.
“With nculear-armed India and Pakistan very much in play, and Iran and Iraq engaged in their won arms race, readers who’ve been emptying bookstores in search of instant wisdom on low-tech terrorism and early Islam would be wise to pick up The Unfinished Twentieth Century that tells how we got into this nuclear mess and how we might get out of it.” — New York Times
Jonathan Schell teaches at Wesleyan University and the New School University. A Fellow at the Nation Institute and co-founder of a recently formed citizen’s initiative to negotiate the abolition of nuclear weapons, he is the author of nine books including Fate of the Earth, which was published in twenty countries.