Jonathan Schell

#2

Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb, begins the story of his boyhood with his mother's suicide, when he was 13 months old. After several itinerant years, his father finally landed Rhodes and his brother Stanley in the house of a ghastly woman who was to become Rhodes's stepmother. Living a tortured existence, Rhodes and his brother were systematically starved, sent out of the house for 12-hour stretches, and deprived of any kind of emotional warmth. Eventually they were rescued and sent to live on a farm, where they began to heal.

#3

In a series of conversations with high officials such as Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, General George Lee Butler, Schell finds support for complete nuclear disarmament within an unlikely group - the very generals and politicians who devised and executed the nuclear policies of the Cold War. In a spirit of optimism and hope, Schell and those he interviews announce their belief that freeing the world of nuclear danger is today a realistic political goal. They urge all citizens "to end the forced cohabitation with horror, the shotgun marriage with final absurdity - to snap out of the trance of the Cold War, annul the double suicide pact...and take the step that alone can free us from nuclear danger and corruption, namely, the abolition of nuclear weapons."