Jonathan Schell

Jonathan Schell was the peace and disarmament correspondent for the Nation magazine and a Senior Lecturer at Yale University. Among many other works, he was the author of The Real War, The Fate of the Earth, and The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. He died on March 25, 2014.
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, July 22, 2014 The Path to a New 1914? [ This essay is slightly adapted from Jonathan Schell’s 2003 book, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People , and appears at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of its publisher, Metropolitan Books. ] Then came the attack of September 11th. Like the starting gun... Read more |
Views Friday, January 18, 2013 How Did the Gates of Hell Open in Vietnam? For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible, but such, it turns out, has literally been the case. Read more |
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Views Friday, April 06, 2012 Thinking the Unthinkable on Iran The question of what to do about Iran’s nuclear program is a policy riddle of the first order for the United States and the world. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 21, 2011 Attacking Libya -- and the Dictionary: The War on the Word 'War' The Obama administration has come up with a remarkable justification for going to war against Libya without the congressional approval required by the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, August 06, 2008 A Powerful Peace: A World Free of Nuclear Weapons With each year that passes, nuclear weapons provide their possessors with less safety while provoking more danger. Possession of nuclear arms provokes proliferation. Both nourish the global nuclear infrastructure, which in turn enlarges the possibility of acquisition by terrorist groups. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 08, 2008 A Season of Change Change, change, change, change, change! With astounding unanimity, throughout the politic sphere--in the campaigns, in the media coverage, in pollsters' surveys--the word "change" is bubbling on people's lips. You'd think that a word, not a person, had won each of the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, November 14, 2007 The Road from Washington to Karachi to Nuclear Anarchy The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan's intelligence chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, "You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us." Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 26, 2006 The Torture Election The Congressional campaign of 2006 slouches toward election day through a grotesque landscape of torture and excuses for torture, scabrous messages from a Congressman to young boys, a Congressional cover-up of the same, murder and countermurder every day in Iraq (a heart-stopping 655,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion, according to a Johns Hopkins study), and nuclear fallout from North Korea (of the political if not the literal kind). Read more |
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Views Saturday, October 14, 2006 Shock Waves From Kilju The reported North Korean nuclear test, occurring in an underground shaft in a place called Kilju, was pretty much on the opposite side of the earth from the United States, yet it felt very close, almost as if it had occurred here, or maybe, in that peculiar way of atomic explosions, everywhere on earth at once. (For one thing, the pictorial representations of the shocks radiating outward from ground zero to seismographs all over the globe reinforced this feeling.) There is something about nuclear explosions that collapses distance. Americans felt the effect immediately after Hiroshima. Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 27, 2006 Too Late For Empire Repetition Read more |