Values at War: Selected Tanner Lectures on the Nuclear Crisis
Dyson discusses the grave problem of nuclear weapons, defining poetry as the whole range of literary reaction to war and weapons. He believes that human cultural patterns are more durable than weapons technology or the political arrangements in which weapons have become embedded and, thus, that hope is reasonable. Aron juxtaposes the concepts of arms control and peace research and analyzes the origins and present state of the armaments debate in an attempt to create a basis from which to deduce principles of action. He asks two crucial questions: Are hostile states able to come to an essential agreement about the relationship between their forces, and Have we learned the causes of war and the means for preventing it? Robinson reviews the steps by which the world has come to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. She considers international economic and military complicity, national egoism, and high-level failure of morals in shaping a plea for a sane retreat from the edge of the abyss.