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This book is concerned with analysing the reasons why both western and eastern countries have arrived at the present situation—a situation dominated by the danger of nuclear conflict. The author declares himself to be a radical psychoanalyst who has taught psychiatry in New York for several years. He has written several other books and papers and is now living in California, where he continues to practise and write. Kovel defines himself as an American who has lived through the nuclear age in an American way (with successive feelings of triumph, fear, horror, outrage and resistance) since his ninth birthday, the year in which the first atomic bombs were launched on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Against the State of Nuclear Terror was written during the Summer of 1982 and was originally commissioned as a supplement to the British Channel 4 TV Series 'Crucible: Science in Society'. The aim of the series was to help ordinary people develop an awareness of the science, technology and medicine which are increasingly affecting their lives, work and leisure. It is probably because of its conjunction with a television series that Kovel's book contains numerous photographs, designs and sketches to do with the nuclear danger and the anti-nuclear campaign, as if the written message of the book were to be made more persuasive and effective via its rich iconography.
Kovel's writing is difficult to follow sometimes, owing to his understandable emotional involvement in the matter and the wish to put his case as strongly as possible; he very often repeats the same concept in different contexts. This sort of rhetorical device becomes tiresome and sometimes we feel that the repetitions are not allowing Kovel to develop his arguments effectively and in a less rigid way. Kovel himself openly states that the pressure under which he wrote did not allow him to write as he wanted and that he would have liked more leisure to develop his thoughts. Indeed the book aims to initiate a lively d