Thesis of doom

This is an ‘alarming book’, says the blurb on the jacket, about ‘the relation between science and technology, war and peace’, uncovering ‘a number of ways by which we may bring about the fate that history predicts for us’. It turns out, however, that it is really the author who is predicting and not history, and often intemperately at that: some of the premises on which the arguments rest are not always capable of bearing the weight.