AGE OF OVERKILL

Written abroad, during two years in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe, this is a powerful and demanding picture of politics today in which Mr. Lerner depicts ""the forces which have broken loose in the world, and what they are doing to the contours of the familiar landscape of world politics"". The ""forces"" as enumerated are five: the nuclear spiral, the emergence of two power clusters, heightening of revolutionary nationalism, political war, and the emergence of the UN. ""The familiar landscape of world politics"" are those recognizable in terms of the Machtpolitik which maintained for centuries a systematic equilibrium. In this age in which there is enough lethal weaponry, possessed by each of the major power clusters, to kill every man, woman, and child 35 times over, the rationale of power politics no longer obtains. Worked into this major premise is an analysis of the emerging nations (""When liberal commentators dismiss the whole array of these regimes as 'dictatorial' they wipe out the distinction between them and the Communist regimes and leave only a nonexistent pristine democracy as a working alternative"", the balance of terror (on his visit to Dachau ""A number of times in history the intolerable has happened"") the treason of the intellectuals, the absolute necessity for a new morality (""a frame of order which will not dispense with power but will outlaw aggressive national and- idealogical military power, subordinating it to the power necessary for a collective world security."") A humanist speaks with insight, overwhelming knowledge, and great concern.