Lewis Thomas

Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear weaponry, showing that the brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned and that even medicine’s most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation.

And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age.