Dr Strangelove, I Presume by Michael Foot Gollancz 241pp, £16.99 in UK
Many people sighed with relief when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disintegrated. However, according to Michael Foot, who was one of the founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and devoted his long, illustrious parliamentary career to the CND cause, the danger of a nuclear holocaust is greater now than ever and continues to grow.
At the age of eighty-five, the doughty old polemicist has lost none of his fervour and eloquence. His account of the international nuclear arms race in defiance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Test Ban Treaty is a chillingly convincing warning that the world still has plenty to worry about.
In 1995, nine countries possessed nuclear weapons: Russia (11,000 warheads), the United States (8,500), Ukraine (1,500), France (800), Kazakhstan (600), China (300), the United Kingdom (300), Israel (100) and Belarus (36) - many more than enough to exterminate the entire human species.
Foot greatly admired Nehru and his successors for maintaining India's moderate stance of international political non-alignment for many years after independence, and was shocked last year when India ostentatiously tested a nuclear device, provoking Pakistan immediately to follow suit. The rivals were spending money on armaments that was desperately needed to relieve the poverty of their people, yet their leaders' sense of priorities was expressed by President Bhutto's promise that "Pakistan will have nuclear weapons, even if our people have to eat grass".
The United States, contemplating the nuclear potential of hostile countries such as Iraq, Libya and North Korea, is engaged in a weapons development programme bigger than during the Cold War, with an annual growth of $4 billion now, compared with the equivalent of $3.7 billion then. New methods of enhancing the power and accuracy of missiles with nuclear warheads make underground tests unnecessary, so that progress (if that's the word) can be made discreetly, without flouting the Test Ban Treaty.
The founder members of the nuclear club, especially the United States and its most obedient ally, Britain, still argue that it is all right for them to maintain their nuclear arsenals but wrong for other nations to build bombs of their own.
Foot pleads, in the Hazlitt stylishness that made him one of this century's pre-eminent orators in the House of Commons, in favour of multilateral disarmament. Anything less may prove deadly.
Against the suicidal irrationality of men such as General Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to use the atom bomb against the Chinese in the Korean War, and General Curtis E. LeMay, the one-time commander of Strategic Air Command, USAF (slogan: "Peace Is Our Business"), who threatened to bomb Hanoi back into the Stone Age, Foot cites voices of reason. None of them is more persuasive than that of Robert McNamara, who served as US Defence Secretary under President Kennedy and President Johnson, from 1961 to 1968.
"If we dare break out of the mind set that has guided the nuclear strategy of the nuclear powers for over four decades," McNamara wrote in retirement, "I believe we can indeed put the genie back in the bottle. If we do not, there is a substantial risk that the twenty-first century will see a nuclear tragedy."
Foot asks: "Who could believe that the further proliferation of these weapons would help to preserve the peace? Who could believe that if the process continued they would not fall into the hands of some Dr Faustus or Dr Strangelove, some new Idi Amin or new General Galtieri?"
Disarmament now, Michael Foot urges - or the fire next time.