Volume 1, Number 3 · September 26, 1963
Peacemeal
By Malcolm Muggeridge
Unarmed Victory
by Bertrand Russell
Simon and Schuster, 155 pp., $3.50
There is an aged philosopher in Johnson's Rasselas who has persuaded himself that he is personally responsible for ensuring that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. He conscientiously devotes himself to discharging this responsibility, convinced that otherwise all life on our planet will languish in darkness or wither away in perpetual sunshine. Another aged philosopher, Bertrand Russell, is an almost exactly analogous case today. If he relaxes his efforts, he appears to suppose, a nuclear war must break out, and the human race become extinct; an eventuality for which, contrary to Russell, and especially after reading him, I often feel I simply cannot wait. In Unarmed Victory he provides an account of how, in his own estimation, he prevented the Cuban crisis and the Indo-Chinese frontier dispute from developing into such a catastrophe.
Review, 1413 words
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