HAS MAN A FUTURE?

Bertrand Russell is now the world's foremost grand old man of the good and noble cause; as a staunchantagonist of nuclear war, a believer in civil disobedience and British neutralism, he's even made the TV newsreels and the Sunday supplements. His new book should find a grateful audience among thoughtful readers; it is a keenly critical, intellectually enriching, markedly humane study of the pivotal problems confronting our planet today. Lord Russell outlines the most pressing: the urgency of disarmament, the importance of abandoning atomic tests, the perilous policy of instant retaliation and the immediate prevention of the spread of rocketry weapons to any more nations. He speaks of General Gavin's frightening admission that a nuclear blast against Russia could with an adverse wind blow over all Europe; he warns the advocates of such a war in the name of Liberty that the end-result would be ""disaster socialism"", a primitive, regimented society; he writes wittily that fallout tends not to cross the equator, making South Africa and Australia the only place to be; he contends that both East and West are caught in an inextricable net of prestige, propaganda and power politics. However, his continual moral equation of the Soviets with the US and the absence of any grappling with the long history of International communism's underground activities mars both the considerations and conciusious of his survey. There's gravity and goodness here; alas, unsophistication, also.