With its telling and dispassionate prose and with its life-or-death message, this remarkable and urgently important book should and must chill the hearts and sober the thoughts of anyone who reads it. Nigel Calder is a widely known and respected English science writer and editor. For many years he edited London's New Scientist, which achieved a reputation and influence far beyond its circulation. In this volume he has marshaled the services of sixteen eminent scientists from six countries and asked them from the vantage points of their own disciplines to set down their projections of warfare in the future.

No layman who reads this will ever be likely again to characterize the whole scientific community as either oblivious or uncaring. As the French authors of the chapter on chemical warfare put it, "The question may arise: is all science damned? We must either eliminate science or eliminate war. We cannot have both." There is undeniably a chilling fascination in these glimpses into the future—at robot centipede tanks fused with H-bombs; at nerve gases; at refined missiles and submarines; at bacterial weapons; at the fatal fallacies built into atomic deterrence; at the possibilities of tampering with nature itself; at all the political, scientific, and military nightmares which mankind is striving to make real. Yet there is no danger that any reader will for a moment lose sight of the fact that Unless Peace Comes is not an extrapolative catalogue of the gadgetry of warfare but an awesome underlining of the hugest moral imperative in the history of mankind.