War. War never changes. You don't see books being advertised very often, especially these days. Bookshops, yes. Individual books, not so much. It wasn't exactly commonplace 34 years ago, either, when Pan books published "The Fate of the Earth" by Jonathan Schell (who died almost exactly a year ago at the age of 70), a laugh-a-decade tome in which the late New Yorker alumnus attempted to lay down, in writing, every single one of the ten billion or so drawbacks to having nuclear weapons on the planet. The Cold War was back at bursting point by 1982, with the bullish, fist-shaking Reagan in charge of America and a succession of sick old men in the USSR - Brezhnev had just died and been replaced by the aloof, unknowable Yuri Andropov, whose distant demeanour was partly down to being a former head of the KGB, and partly down to the fact that he spent the majority of his tenure in hospital with failing kidneys. (Meanwhile, his successor, Konstantin Chernenko - who he'd ironically been manouvered to the leadership to block - was actively dying by the time he actually got the job and lasted even less time) Reagan, meanwhile, was actively and deliberately escalating the situation, particularly in 1983 when he declared the USSR an evil empire and proposed the construction of a magic laser space umbrella which, despite being literally impossible, successfully reignited the nuclear arms race as a concept. The same year, the BBC made "Threads", the most dispiriting movie ever made. To see it is to understand despair. In the midst of all this Protect and Survive bothering came The Fate of the Earth, which might as well have been called "How You Will Die". Schell forensically and dispassionately deconstructs the potential consequences of a nuclear exchange, from the initial shockwave levelling cities to the potential disintegration of the ozone in the atmosphere (leaving the Earth uninhabitable bar the oceans), and comes to the unavoidable conclusion that the detonation of even one or two of these things would basically be the full stop for the human race and probably 97% of life on Earth. This is an advert for that bag of chuckles, and as you'd expect, it contains zero pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows. Instead. it depicts an extended metaphor within another extended metaphor, interspersed with effusive praise from the newspapers and suchlike, concluding with the title and author flatly stated in small text, because this is an important work, yeah? Not necessarily what you want to bring down to the shelter, though, except maybe as a manual. Not least because it provides about 900 reasons that building a shelter would be completely pointless.

• published: 19 Mar 2015
• views: 188