Thermonuclear Monarchy Choosing Between Democracy and Doom [Paperback]

During his impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon boasted, I can go into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be dead. Nixon was accurately describing not only his own power but also the power of every American president in the nuclear age.Eloquent.The premise of this book is as relevant as it is horrifying, that the power to inflict great harm doesnt belong to those that it supposedly protects. I congratulate Elaine Scarry on her intellectual courage and moral clarity and in proposing the only possible way out.A really remarkable work, ranging across ethics, law and politics to pose genuinely radical challenges to the confused and potentially lethal systems that pass for democracy in our world. A painfully timely intervention.Elaine Scarry offers a coruscating critique of current policies, arguing that they are antithetic to the spirit of the U.S. constitution, and indeed to basic democratic principles. This eloquent and scholarly book offers a compelling case for swifter progress toward their elimination.Even someone unpersuaded by Elaine Scarrys constitutional analysis cannot avoid being gripped by her stark depiction of how utterly incompatible our eighteenth-century constitutional structure and the social contract it embodies are with our twenty-first-century weapons of mass destruction, weapons that can annihilate tens of millions of human souls in the blink of an eye and at the whim of a single individual, consulting with no one. A sober and haunting meditation on this tension between our institutions and our capacities, Scarrys book requires any thoughtful reader to revisit the basic postulates and the deepest human purposes of our system of government.A few years ago General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, condemned the faith in nuclear weapons to which his life had been wrongly dedicated and the breathtaking audacity in maintaining them when we should stand tls£