“I would have rated it higher were it not for two points which are admittedly out of the author's control. The first is the book is getting *very* dated. It describes the bi-polar cold-war world with a poor and unorganized 3rd-class country. Because of this, Schell's "Fate of the Earth" is really rather the "Fate of the United States and the USSR" (yes, USSR, it's pre-1989).
So the second point is that, while the book is dated, and because it is so dated, there is very little discussion of (kind of surprisingly if you think about it) what the fate of the Earth (with a capital E; the author actually never capitalizes "earth" when using a proper noun, which annoyed me to no end) actually *is*. He describes in great deal Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the differences in the way their blast wave and overpressure and suchlike worked because of of geography and structure, and gives accurate casualty details and fallout vectors and tonnage thereof (that is, tonnage of irradiated mass).
He goes on to take New York for example (a kind of tragic example, looking back) and explains the linearity of blast effects. He says "the Soviets" have a 60MT warhead (which we now know is more like a 100MT warhead, depending on the tamper used in the physics package), and the sort of damage and casualties that would render on a city. He further extrapolates to the (frankly, I think it's a silly notion, but there's no question he's thorough in his research and the presentation in the book) actual use of the at-the-time approximate number of nuclear weapons in the world: 11,000 warheads, most being smaller (tens to a couple hundred kT), but with a large number of "city busters" (This is actually the term they used in Nuclear Game Theory when I was in school; I did then and still now find it grossly morbid) of ten to sixty megatons.
Essentially, the USSR and the US are annihilated, but the description stops there. If this is in fact an account of the fate of the Earth, not the earth (as in what is in your garden), should we not discuss global weather patterns, temperature changes… people have even discussed pole instability for the planet during sustained nuclear war. None of this was discussed, brought up, refuted, or anything. And as such, I really have to take a star off for its very limited discussion of "earth" and another for being oh-so-very outdated. The publisher has the right guy, and it is the right time for an updated copy of this book. Perhaps a new edition would be useful to the academic community.
And me.”
