At first glance Children of the Dust contains little to trigger alarm. Who is in favor of nuclear war, after all? Although the book refers vaguely to "the dangerous international situation" which preceded the attack, the story includes no details. The bunker society is constricted and authoritarian, but it comes across as realistic under the circumstances. A closer look, however, reveals several ambiguous issues.

The failure of technology is one. It is never made clear whether high technology is implicated in the nuclear blowup, whether it would have led inevitably to a catastrophe of one kind or another, or if its postwar breakdown stems only from it being unsuited for the new world being born. This is not a question that a novel necessarily needs to answer. But teachers and readers should be aware that the book raises the question and then waffles about exploring it...