An alarm call for the world

Michael Foot

Gollancz, #16.99

Topicality is a true measure of the first-class journalist. Controversy is, of course, also vital if the subject is to be a polemic, but what is most important for any contribution to a current debate to have impact is that it must be informed and relevant. Michael Foot is 85 years old and he has written here one of the best pieces of polemical journalism we are likely to read this year.

Not for him the mundanities of a maundering old age, or a gentle collection of an old man's memories. Oh no. With Dylan Thomas he is raging yet against the dying of the light, with Byron he looks fearfully with mad disquietude on the dull sky, the pall of past world, and, with Adrian Mitchell, he considers how ''the planet staggers like King Lear/ with his dead darling in his arms''. He looks around him at the world and he is angry and afraid about the nuclear arms race.

There is plenty of history here, true enough - and poetry, too - but this is not a backward-looking book. It is, rather, staring the future in the face and stabbing an accusatory finger at the governments of the world that are failing to do the same. ''Vintage Michael Foot'', his publishers claim for him, and for once they have got it right.

In the 1963 black comedy Dr Strangelove, about the fanatic who advocates pre-emptive nuclear strikes, an insane American air force general played by George C Scott says: ''I don't say we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million people killed.''

That is, in brief, Foot's thesis. He asks: ''How are we to restore - how to establish - a genuine international order with the programme for the dismantling of the nuclear arsenals properly decreed and with a timetable? Nothing less will serve as an objective, and what is needed now is a new sense of urgency.''

The catalyst which has provoked this onslaught was what Foot describes as the ''ultimate insanity'' of an arms race on the Indian sub-continent with all that this implies not only for the future security of the world but for the chances of India handling its own profound domestic problems, specifically in seeking a means to handle poverty.

That his beloved India should be so wickedly distracted by such madness Foot ascribes primarily to the ineptitude of American foreign policy, but he places the responsibility - the guilt - for what is not happening to attack poverty upon us all. He is bitterly critical of Britain, too - ''our right little, tight little island'', pathetic lackeys of the United States on the one hand, while also being pusillanimous in failing either to recognise and warn of the perilous situation that has been developing in Pakistan in recent years or doing anything sufficiently to help sustain Indian democracy.

He does pay tribute to the work that has been done on the international stage by countries, including Britain, to secure international agreements to limit weapon development and control existing arsenals. But his object is to alert public opinion to the terrible dangers that exist and the need for a revival of the currently stalled disarmament process.

He wants to wake up the world. He is puzzled and bewildered by the fact that, despite the illegal nuclear tests conducted by both India and Pakistan last year, the five nuclear states of the world have all found excuses to do almost nothing in response, despite the signal that this could send to at least another six states with the capacity to do the same.

And he is outraged by what he sees as the descent towards international anarchy marked by the United States' readiness to launch nuclear strikes - for example against Sudan and Afghanistan last year.

He explicitly criticises his successor as Labour leader, Tony Blair, for failing to have stopped such action when he knew of it in advance, and specifically suggests that Britain should regain its independent voice in order to help achieve his programme for progress to a non-nuclear world.

It may not be a particularly cheery subject, but Dr Strangelove, I Presume is an excellent read. It is painstakingly researched and carefully documented. It is placed in context in the post-war world, Foot rehearsing for us the main signposts on the road to disarmament since Hiroshima and the arguments of the main players. It is, of course, scholarly. It is in part a hymn of love to India. It is a work of journalism, partial yes, but properly sourced and argued. It is lyrical, not just because of the poets he calls in evidence but because of the commitment and passion he conveys. And best of all is the author's use of language, the cadences of his sentences, the originality of his expression, his humour and his passion, his own authentic voice.

There were people who were moved to tears when Michael Foot was elected leader of the Labour Party because, at last, a politician who would always put principle before anything else had triumphed.

His tenure of the post was unhappy, tragic even, in what his failure as leader implied for principled politics. But he shows us here how those principles are yet undimmed.