Its description of the consequences of nuclear war "forces even the most reluctant person to confront the unthinkable: the destruction of humanity and possibly most life on Earth".

The Yale University sociologist Kai T. Erikson, reviewing the book in The New York Times, wrote, “This is a work of enormous force.

This may be the price one has to pay for the attempt to enlarge perspectives and to turn away from 'crusted and hardened patterns of thought and feeling.’”[4] Psychologist David P. Barash described the book as “at once hauntingly lyrical and rigorously scientific, it details the effects on New York City, on the nation and on the prospects for continued human existence…a careful examination of the concept of extinction, its logical, ethical and scientific consequences.

The prospect of human extinction is an idea we may speak of in passing, but most of us have never really explored its meaning, not even in imagination.”[5] In an unpublished review of The Fate of the Earth, the social scientist Brian Martin was skeptical of Schell's conclusions, positing that the author's argument that "most people" would die in the nuclear war was exaggerated, especially for the Global South.

And usually when he spells out a worst case as a possibility—for example… a 10,000 Mt attack on the United States—this becomes implicitly a certainty for later discussion, with qualifications dropped.