The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger

Now in paperback, Jonathan Schell’s The Seventh Decade lays bare the fearful shape that nuclear danger has unexpectedly assumed in the twenty-first century. Far from disappearing with the cold war, the bomb is today in the midst of a worldwide revival. The invasion of Iraq, the nuclear programme of North Korea and Iran, the rising danger of nuclear terrorism, and the reinvigoration of the nuclear establishments among the old cold war rivals have all put the nuclear issue back on the world’s front pages and returned it to the centre of geopolitical strife.Schell addresses the fundamental questions: How and why has nuclear danger revived? Where are we heading? What can be done? And, he argues that half measures will no longer suffice, nor will piece meal solutions that address isolated aspects of the crisis. Offering a comprehensive approach that takes all factors into account, The Seventh Decade calls for a debate, national and global, on the paths away from what still remains the gravest, most urgent of all dangers to humanity.