Push-Button Holocaust: Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7

Seed, David. "Push-Button Holocaust: Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7." Foundation #57 (Spring 1993): 68-86.

Detailed analysis of Roshwald's 1959 novel of nuclear apocalypse. Argues that Level 7 compellingly combines the dystopian and future history genres, creating a work comparable to Y. Zamiatin's We, A. Huxley's Brave New World, and G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Roshwald, a political scientist born in Poland, presents complex philosophical and psychological insights in this study of authority and nuclear technologies set in an elaborate, futuristic military bomb facility, a world metaphorically and explicitly linked to the "structured levels of Dante's Inferno" and the seven levels of Hell in Jewish mythology (see M. Abrash's "Dante's Hell as an Ideal Mechanical Environment"). Ends with a brief coda on Roshwald's second novel, A Small Armageddon (1962), which anticipates Dr. Strangelove's Jack D. Ripper as a madman who controls nuclear weapons. (RFS, 27/04/95)