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Jonathan Schell, 2004 Nuclear-Free Future Solutions Award Recipient
Robert Del Tredici's Presentation Speech
As a journalist, Jonathan Schell cut his teeth on the war in Vietnam. Then he focused his gaze on the Cold War and, like a crocodile, closed his jaws on the Bomb and did not let go. Like few others he has understood the Bomb's primal and mercurial spirit of annihilation. In The Fate of the Earth, The Abolition and The Gift of Time he has deconstructed the rationale behind our addiction to the doctrine of deterrence, and has come to an uncompromising conclusion: Abolish the Bomb.
Today he receives the Nuclear-Free Future Award, not in the Education category but in the category of Solutions because, over the arc of his long and passionate career, he has formulated a proposition as fundamental as it is useful. I'd put it right up there with the statement, "All men are created equal" - only that truth has over time been crippled and has currently lost its capacity to fly. Schell's proposition, on the other hand, has deepened in significance with time. It is: "Where there is a will there is a way."
This statement has two sides. The first is the individual aspect, where each one of us on the path of activism finds his or her own way up the sheer cliff face of the nuclear world alone.
The statement also has a collective aspect. In The Unconquerable World, Jonathan has uncovered and charted how the collective will of the people of the nations of our modern world have sttled things on their own terms, independent of tyrants and empires; and in the process they have overturned some of the mightiest entrenched powers.
We present Jonathan with this award as we stand on the brink of a new dark age, an age already bristling with crises so steep that the foundations of our idealism are threatened and the very genetic code of our democratic freedoms is at risk.
The key to surviving this coming era will have to include the truth, formulated over a very long time and enunciated so clearly by Jonathan Schell: "We have somehow acquiesced, half asleep, to the conditions in which a new tyranny is preparing to flourish; and we can, if we want to bad enough, make a difference, even against what seem to be impossible odds. Where there is a will there is a way."
And where there is a Jonathan Schell, there is a quiet torch of inspiration to guide us along the way.
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