In December 2013 post entitled Schell: Complete Disarmament is the only Sane Path, we wrote about an excerpt from Jonathan Schell‘s 1982 book The Fate of the Earth which forms the nineteenth chapter of The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace .
Below are the obituaries from the AP and Democracy Now!
NEW YORK (AP) — Jonathan Schell, the crusading author, journalist and anti-war activist who condemned conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq and warned of a nuclear holocaust in terrifying detail in his galvanizing best seller, “The Fate of the Earth,” has died at age 70.
via Jonathan Schell, anti-war activist, dead at 70.
And the journalist, author and activist Jonathan Schell has died at the age of 70. A leading advocate for nuclear disarmament, Schell’s bestselling book, “The Fate of the Earth,” is recognized for helping spark the anti-nuclear movement of the early 1980s. Speaking to Democracy Now! in 2007, Schell said a nuclear-free world is an achievable goal.
Jonathan Schell: “If we had a president who was dedicated to this aim, I think it could become a reality. The problems — it’s not like global warming, where you perhaps have to change the whole way that we live on a global basis. We know how to get rid of these things. Already, we’ve come down about halfway since the height of the Cold War. We just have to keep going in that direction. It’s a tremendous task, but it’s a notably doable one.”
Schell was a longtime writer for The Nation magazine. In a tribute, The Nation editor Katrina vanden Huevel said: “The power and persuasiveness of so much of Jonathan Schell’s work came not only from his elegant style, clarity of analysis and powerful logic but also in the enduring belief that there is no idea so powerful as a moral one.”
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