Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

With the success of his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize, Richard Rhodes established his reputation as an authority on the nuclear-weapons history of the United States. Arsenals of Folly will strengthen that reputation. It is a superb book: well researched, told with riveting narrative flair, and consistently unsettling in its challenges to common assumptions about U.S. history. Rhodes skillfully weaves two narrative strands--an account of the Reagan-Gorbachev years and a history of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race--into a story that should be required reading for members of Congress and voting citizens. Readers watch history unfolding as two proud nations push to the brink of bankruptcy and beyond pursuing policies and an arms race that, as Rhodes carefully documents, far too many politicians, military leaders, and diplomats knew were nonsensical. The only winners in this book are the underappreciated people who injected some sanity into the deliberations, a diverse group that included Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Shultz, Eduard Shevardnadze, and others. Shultz deserves praise for blocking attempts by radicals to derail diplomatic negotiations between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev, asking his people in front of the Soviets "Are you out of your mind? This is what it's about. The longer they talk, the better it is." Arsenals of Folly is a devastating critique of what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" and the deeply flawed policies it sustained in the Soviet Union and the United States. Near the book's end, Rhodes uses business leaders, scholars, and civil engineers to show the negative price the U.S. has paid for the nuclear-arms race and bluntly states his final conclusion: "Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear-arms race and the corresponding militarization of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national-security state that held the entire human world hostage." One year later, with the U.S. economy in the worst shape since World War II, Rhodes' prescient analysis cuts even deeper. Armchair Interviews says: Arsenals of Folly is highly recommended.

An amazing conclusion to Rhodes' trilogy about the Bomb. As always, riveting and filled with fascinating anecdotes. The reflections at the end of this book about the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own country's current path will stay with you for days. Bravo!

Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly is a thoughtful book that will leave many readers very unsettled. Rhodes examines America's and Soviet Russia's nuclear weapons policies with special emphasis on the Reagan-Gorbachev negotiations that along with their aftermaths greatly assisted Gorbachev in successfully unwinding the Cold War. The root policy for both nations, from the beginning of the Cold War until its end, was to bluster, threaten, and temporize. Politicians in both nations framed their policy to suit their times and to yield to dominant opinions. Obscurantic discussions of nuclear war bored most post-World War II presidents, leaving the development of policy, its supervision, and its auditing to others. It was only when Reagan and Gorbachev came to power both with the idea arrived at separately, that the two nations needed to terminate nuclear weapons and the Cold War that progress was possible. Rhodes hammers hard on several important themes. The foremost is that politicians and analysts in both nations after Hiroshima continued to frame nuclear policy as if nuclear arms might be practical weapons, or at least necessary for deterrence. Neither thought, Rhodes argues, provides sound support for the accumulation of nuclear weapons. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is a still lingering remnant of this logic. In his effort to write a compelling history, Rhodes dresses the players in black hats and white hats (or perhaps shades of gray) and leaves off the complicating Shakespearian irony of the tale. To wit: It is unlikely that a president perceived as "left-leaning" could have effectively participated in initiating the end of the Cold War. The Committee on the Present Danger and its neocom allies would have moved to persuade Congress to impeach a man who was engaged in negotiations to reduce American nuclear weapons and delivery systems by 50 per cent and more. Reykjavik needed the neocoms. Rhodes separates his telling of the end of the Cold War from a discussion of the context of American politics. The choice leads, perhaps, to an oversimplified tale, but it is very much in keeping with the root views of Gorbachev and Reagan that this was a straightforward problem for which a solution was dangerously overdue. Doug Wilson Boston, MA

Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes jumps back into the fire of nuclear physics with his latest book "Arsenals of Folly: The Making of The Nuclear Arms Race". Here Rhodes tackles the history of the nuclear arms race from the explosion of "Joe" the first Soviet atomic bomb to the arms escalation and he documents how close we have come on a number of occasions to use these weapons of mass destruction. To give a better overview of the time Rhodes also focuses on the various peace treaties, the development of "Star Wars" (no, not the movie)and Reagan's obsession with trying to engage Gorbachov in trying to defuse the arms race. Beginning with the accident at Chernobyl in 1986 and covering the history of both the United States and Russia as they became involved in their nuclear war dance throughout the latter part of the 20th century, Rhodes uses information demonstrating that the disinformation that we've seen within government recently to shape public opinion has been going on for the last 40 years (big surprise!) creating circumstances that allowed the arms race to escalate out of control. Rhodes begins with Chernobyl (later covering the history of detente and the roles of various presidents before Reagan and Gorbachov sat down to try and rid the world of nuclear arms)because the plant itself was designed to do dual duty as both a reactor and a source of plutonium for weapons. The accident changed Gorbachov's perspective on the destruction that could result from a nuclear device simply because the damage to the environment and human life from Chernobyl was life a small nuclear device going off. This opened the way for more open and honest discussion on how to reduce the world's nuclear arsenal. Rhodes also provides a fair balanced look at various leaders, government officals and scientists who have shifted public policy for their own political ends and agendas. It's a fascinating and involving book that you'll have a hard time putting down. For example, he gives a brief biography for each of the major players to help reader's understand what motivated those involved in both escalating and easing the arms race. He also documents what motivated Reagan to approach Gorbachov (who had already seen the damage that could be done), dispells the "myth" that Reagan brought the Soviet government to its knees by outspending them on defense(the economy of the Soviet giant was already in deep trouble)and discusses why Reagan became obsessed with "Star Wars" (or the SDI)sticking to his guns (pardon the pun)about developing the technology. With a deft analysis of Reagan's personality he points out that SDI and the concept of eliminating the threat of nuclear war truly began after the assassination attempt on the President. It caused him to have an epiphany abandoning the idea that nuclear war and the end of the world was something that couldn't be avoided. The book concludes with a discussion about the fragmenting of the USSR into individual count

Richard Rhodes is perhaps the foremost nuclear historian of our time. His past two books (among many others on extremely varied subjects) on the making of the atomic and hydrogen bombs are landmark historical studies. But as readers of those books would know, they were much more than nuclear histories. They were riveting epic chronicles of war and peace, science and politics in the twentieth century and human nature. In both books, Rhodes discussed in detail other issues, such as the Soviet bomb effort and Soviet espionage in the US. In this book which can be considered the third installment in his nuclear histories (a fourth and final one is also due), Rhodes takes a step further and covers the arms race from the 1950s onwards. He essentially proceeds where he left off, and discusses the maddening arms buildups of the 60s, 70s and 80s. One of the questions our future generations are going to ask is; why do we have such a monstrous legacy of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the earth many times over? The answer cannot be deterrence because much fewer would have sufficed for that. How did we inherit this evil of our times? Much of the book is devoted to answering this question, and the answer is complex. It involves a combination of paranoia generated by ignorance of what the other side was doing, but more importantly threat inflation engendered by hawks in government who used the Soviet threat as a political selling point in part to further their own aims and careers. It is also depressing to realise how in the 50s, when the Soviet atomic bomb programs were still relatively in their beginning stage and the US had already amassed an impressive fleet of weapons, opportunity was lost forever for negotiating peace and preventing the future nuclear arms debacle that we now are stuck with. Rhodes details a very interesting and disconcerting fact; every US president since Truman wanted to avoid nuclear war and was uncomfortable about nuclear weapons, yet every one of them had no qualms about increasing defense spending and encouraging the development of new and more powerful weapons. It was as if a perpetual motion wheel had been set in motion, oiled by paranoia and deep mistrust, not to mention the clever manipulation of ambitious Cold Warriors. In the 50s, hawks like Edward Teller influenced policy and exggerated the threat posed by the Soviets, when in fact Stalin never wanted any kind of war with the US. Later, this role was taken up by people such as Paul Nitze who admittedly was the "father of threat inflation". His job and that of others was to exploit the uncertainty and fear and turn it into a potent force for justifying the arms race. Into the 60s and 70s, Nitze gathered around him a cohort of like-minded people who included today's neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. They wrote reports that tried to argue against detente, and advocated further and more powerful arms buildups. In the middle of th