Jonathan Schell and the End of the Cold War
A few months ago, in the course of trying to reestablish contact with a dear friend, Jonathan Schell, I learned, to my consternation, that he had passed away. It was more than a shock, after the many years of silence that had intervened between us. It felt like an immeasurable loss, not just to me personally but to the world. I first met Jonathan in 1986 when I invited him to the International Monetary Fund to speak to a group of about twenty colleagues about his brilliant book The Fate of the Earth . I had read it years before and had been impressed not only with the content—a clinical analysis of the after-effects of a limited nuclear war between the two major powers— but also by the elegance of the writing, the beauty of the logic, and the power of Jonathan’s arguments. He combined an incisive mind with an exceptionally articulate pen. “Usually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them,” he writes in the book’s opening section. “But sinc...