In February 1982, in the New Yorker, Jonathan Schell imagined and described what a Russian twenty-megaton nuclear bomb (1,600 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of World War II) might do if it hit New York City (his hometown and mine), though its radioactive fallout would have reached significantly farther. That one bomb, he wrote, “would probably doom upward of twenty million people.” He then described just what that nightmare might be like in all too vivid detail. (”If the wind was blowing at 15 miles an hour, fallout of lethal intensity would descend in a plume about 150 miles long and as much as fifteen miles wide.”)

Given the nuclear arsenals that nine nations on this embattled planet of ours now possess (with undoubtedly more to come), god knows what a nuclear war might be like so many years later, other than a potentially world-ending experience. Of course, since he wrote that, it’s become all too clear that we humans have managed to come up with a second way to do in this world of ours, which we’ve all too mildly labeled “climate change.” (Unfortunately, it won’t just be “change,” but a long-term catastrophe of an almost unimaginable kind.)

In many ways, climate change might be considered the equivalent of nuclear weapons already going off around this planet of ours, just in remarkably slow motion. And by the way, to give Schell full credit, more than 40 years ago, he was already aware of that phenomenon, too, writing then: “Nuclear explosions are far from being the only perturbations in question; a heating of the global atmosphere through an increased greenhouse effect, which could be caused by the injection of vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the air (for instance, from the increased burning of coal), is another notable peril of this kind. But a nuclear holocaust would be unique in its suddenness.” And at that time, he was almost uniquely focused on the two ways we humans could........

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