‘Button’ Oversight

Your excellently written review of “The Button” (Book Review, May 12) fails, as does the book’s author, to consider the various scenarios (especially the nuclear winter) that make all plans to conduct nuclear war not only meaningless but insane. Of what use are first-strike capability, decapitation, superiority, precision or any other capability if they result in self-decapitation? And yet we seem unable to escape from what are endless discussions of what are essentially side-show scenarios when they would all lead to the final catastrophe, the kaput for all.

WALTER RELIS

Santa Barbara