It has now been more than four decades since the birth of the atomic age, and the development of tit-wand better nuclear weapons has proceeded apace throughout the period. So much so that the United States and the Soviet Union now have enough Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) not merely to destroy themslves but to obliterate mankind as well. Yet, as Michael Joseph Smith points out in his essay, "virtually from the beginning of the nuclear age, political and military strategists have disagreed about the wider implications of a radically new weapon." A native of Yonkers, New York, where his father was a local politician, Mr. Smith went to Harvard as an undergraduate. A course called "War" taught by noted foreign affairs scholar Stanley Hoffman "convinced me to abandon a standing interest in urban politics and vague plans to go to law school. The larger questions presented by a world of competing sovereign states seemed more compelling." Winning a Marshall Scholarship in his senior year at Harvard, Mr. Smith has continued studying those wider questions at Oxford under such mentors as the late Hedley Bull and Alastair Buchan. After receiving an M.Phil, from Oxford in International Relations in 1976, Mr. Smith returned to Harvard to work for an American Ph.D., again with Stanley Hoffmann, which he received in 1982. His dissertation will be published by Louisiana early this year under the title Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger. Mr. Smith taught at Harvard from 1982 to 1985 and is now a member of the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Native Washingtonian Ann Beattie burst upon the American literary scene in 1976, with the simultaneous publication of her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, and first collection of short stories, Distortions. During the next decade, becoming one of the country's best-known young writers, the busy Ms. Beattie produced two novels. Falling in Place, 1981, and Love Always, 1985, four more collections of short stories, Secrets and Surprises, 1979, Jack Lighting, 1981, The Burning House, 1982, and Where You'll Find Me, 1986. She recently completed her first work of nonfiction, a monograph on the artist Alex Katz.

With the nation preparing to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Constitution, one of the most enduring documents of the Enlightenment, John Seelye takes a look at another product of the 1780's, namely. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, first published in 1784. Of the Notes, Mr. Seelye writes "perhaps no single work of art ...so succintly delineates the Enlightenment connection with American enterprise." He further points out that in the Notes, Jefferson included an extended description of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, a vast area the second American President would acquire for the United States within 20 years through the Louisiana Purchase. To explore the area, Jefferson mounted the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and it—"the kind of imperial adventure we call epic" — is eloquently recounted by Mr. Seelye.