66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the stratosphere and which is crucial to life on earth as it protects the earth's surface from the lathal ultra-violet radiation. Schell describes a ten thousand megaton nuclear attack on the US as follows: Flashes of white light would suddenly illumine large areas of the country as thousands of suns, each one brighter than the sun itself, blossomed over cities, suburbs and towns. In the same moments when the first wave of missiles arrived, the vast majority of people in the region first targetted would be irradiated, crushed or burned to death. The thermal pulses would subject more than six hundred thousand square miles, or one-sixth of the total land-mass of the nation to a minimum level of forty calories per centimeter squared —a level of heat that chars human beings. ... As the attack proceeded, as much as three quarters of the country could be subjected to incendiary levels of heat, and so, wherever there was inflammable matrial, could be set ablaze. In the ten seconds or so after each bomb hit, as blast waves swept outwards from thousands of ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like leaves in a gust of wind. ... Initially all the habitations, places of work and other man-made things— substantially the whole human construct in the United States would be vaporised, blasted or otherwise pulverised out of existance. ... Worse than these immediate effects would be the impact on the eco-system of the entire planet. All that could survive on planet earth could be a few types of insects and certain varieties of grass— "a republic of insects and grass", as Schell puts it. After marshalling the available science to understand the consequences of a nuclear war, Schell grapples with the meaning of this fate—"a scarcely imaginable horror lying just behind the surface of our normal life, and capable of breaking through into that normal life at any second". Man, in his discovery of nuclear fission has unlocked the cosmic secret of how the sun and stars work; and he seeks to apply this cosmic force on his own planet, on his own species, and invites his own "ominicide". In a stirring and almost religious testament, Schell, in the second chapter called "The Second Death", explores the meaning of the extinction of human species. According to Schell, the second death means the death of not only the living, but also the millions of future generations who will never be born; it w6uld mean not only the death of life but also the death of birth and the death of death itself; since without life, there can be no death. This is the crux of the nuclear dilemma. Every human being faces and reconciles to his own individal death; but Schell forces us to stare in the face of our collective death as a species—"the second death" ^