BOOK REVIEW 65 powerful book in the best tradition of critical social writing combining incisive analysis of living in the nuclear age with an irresistible moral appeal for political action for the survival of the species and human civilisation. "Unless we rid ourselves of our nuclear arsenals," agrues Schell, "a holocaust not only might occur, but will occur—if not today then tomorrow, if not this year, the next. We have come to live on borrowed time, every year of continued human life on earth is a borrowed year, every day a borrowed day." The destructive power of nuclear weapons is an abstract concept, difficult to grasp in tangible terms. Like the great flood in the Bible it takes on the characteristics of an archetypal catastrophe, the stuff of myth and legend. Nevertheless the probable scale of destruction in the event of a nuclear war can be scientifically spelt out and understood, within the limitation of our knowledge about earth and atmospheric sciences. Nor would a nuclear holocaust be explicable an act of God, for man is at once the creator and the victim of the powerful force entrapped in the nucleus of the atom. What would happen, for instance, if a one megaton bomb (80 times larger in explosive power than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) explosion took place? First, there would be the initial nuclear radiation which, at the time of the explosion, would kill unprotected human beings in an area of six square miles. Simultaneously, an electromagnetic pulse would be generated which, in a high-altitude explosion, would knock out electrical equipment over a wide area by inducing a powerful surge of high voltage. (According to a study, the electromagnetic impulse from a multi-kiloton explosion 125 miles over Omaha, Nebraska, USA, would damage electrical circuits throughout the entire continental United States). As a nuclear explosion is completed, a thermal pulse would be emitted from a fireball which would cause second and third degree burns in exposed human beings in an area of 280 square miles. The thermal pulse would be followed by a blast wave which would flatten buildings within a radius of four and a half miles from ground zero. If the explosion took place on or near the ground, tons of dust debris would be sucked up in a mushroom cloud to return to the earth as radioactive fall-out, which would lethally contaminate over a thousand square miles. In a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, more than a thousand such weapons would be exploded by each side against its adversary. Besides, the virtual annihilation of these two states, the nuclear exchange would generate at least three major global effects. There would be a delayed world-wide radioactive fall-out contaminating the entire surface of the earth. It would probably result in a general cooling of the earth's surface through the lofting from the ground, bursts of millions of tons of dust into the stratosphere. The third global effect would be the partial destruction of the layer of ozone that surrounds the earth in