The arms race is still too recent to write a balanced history of it, and I don't think that this work, unlike the earlier works in the trilogy (particularly The Making of the Atomic Bomb), will hold up that well. That being said, and with the author's obvious dislike of a vast portion of US leadership aside, this is a pretty valuable book, and quite worth the time. ( )

This third volume in Rhodes' continuing series on the history of nuclear weaponry primarily covers the Reagan/Gorbachev years. It's definitely a step down from The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun, but still contains a lot of interesting, if largely depressing, material. ( )

There's been a lot of books out about the history of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race written from many points of view. Many are written out of a particular agenda or with an eye to protecting (or improving) the reputations of actual participants. Arsenals of Folly is a pretty even-handed history from the early days of the Cold War to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Richard Rhodes has gone back to the original records and interviews with participants to set out the history from both sides of the conflict using an approach that lets us readers get into the heads of both US and Soviet leaders.

Rhodes begins with a detailed description of the Chernobyl incident, which first shows just how devastating even a small nuclear exchange could be and then is used to highlight Gorbachev's (and others') motivations for nuclear disarmament. This approach really works well, and captures the reader right away. From this discussion, he moves to the early days after World War II and specifically Mikhail Gorbachev's biography to show where Gorbachev's desire for change came from. The last third or so of the book details nuclear arms limitations talks in the late Reagan years, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the G. H. W. Bush presidency.

Through all this discussion, it becomes pretty clear that there were parties on both sides of the conflict that, for various reasons, didn't want arms reduction and were willing to do some pretty immoral things to keep it from happening. Gorbachev really shines in Rhodes' work as the one with the real vision to change the world, and in many ways, the US did itself and the world a disservice by not trusting him when the time came. The one weakness in Rhodes' research is that he doesn't give enough consideration to the uncertainty of our knowledge of the situation. It's pretty easy to see, now that the whole story's out on the table, what the right path was. It's a whole different problem trying to figure that out in the middle of events. This bias shows in Rhodes' choice not to include non-nuclear areas of conflict in the discussion. Decision-makers at the time on both sides had to consider all events, not just a limited set related to nuclear arms, when developing policy. In spite my concern, Arsenals of Folly is well worth reading, and we can learn an awful lot from Rhodes work. ( )

Beginning with a gripping blow-by-blow account of the Chernobyl accident, Rhodes explores the nuclear arms race from 1986 through the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 in this important and thought-provoking book. He demonstrates that throughout the entire Cold War period, the U.S. had superior numbers of strategic nuclear bombs and warheads. The U.S. political debates that conjured the threat and fear of Soviet first-strike capabilities were “as divorced from reality as the debates of medieval scholars about the characteristics of seraphim and cherubim.”

What accounts from this divergence of fact and policy? One astute observation by Rhodes is that military leaders made “what philosophy calls a category mistake, an assumption that nuclear explosives are military weapons in any meaningful sense of the term, and that [therefore] a sufficient quantity of such weapons can make us secure.”

Political concerns also have played a large role in nuclear arms accumulation. Rhodes points out that the Reagan administration sponsored “the largest peacetime buildup in American history.” Rhodes suggests that some of the motivation was “to starve the beast of government domestic spending, part of the conservative Republican agenda.” In addition, advisors to Reagan, Ford, and Bush such as Richard Perle, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz blatantly twisted intelligence to conform to a bias that was anti-Soviet and pro-military-industrial complex. Particularly in the case of Reagan, advisors had more freedom for manipulation given a president who could not speak coherently without cue cards.

One riveting section of the book describes a very close call to nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that took place in November 1983. “That,” Rhodes charges, “was the return on the neoconservatives’ long, cynical, and radically partisan investment in threat inflation and arms-race escalation.”

A continuing thread in the book is the intelligence, courage, and perseverance of Mikhail Gorbachev. Not only did he have to overcome the ossification of the Soviet system to effect perestroika, but the resistance of U.S. hardliners as well.

How appropriate that Rhodes ends his book with a quote from Robert Oppenheimer, whose opposition to a nuclear arms build-up helped to vitiate his career. Oppenheimer observed presciently in 1953, “We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” As Rhodes charges, the U.S. chose “to distend ourselves into the largest scorpion in the bottle.”

The risks of nuclear war, accidental or intentional, remain high. In fact, an article in Slate Magazine (“A Real Nuclear Option for the Nominees,” by Ron Rosenbaum, posted May 9, 2008) describes more recent “near misses” between U.S. and Russian nuclear-capable bombers. Surely Sarah Palin was looking out her kitchen window on November 22, 2007 when two U.S. F-22s scrambled from Elmendorf AFB in Alaska to intercept two Russian bombers as they approached Alaskan air space. Read this book, and pray the Obama administration turns the tide!

(JAF) ( )

This was an incredible work! What really struck me was how much more culpable the US is in the area of creating obstacles to peace. Another factor that surprised me was how Perle, Wolfowitz, and Cheney have always worked for world domination and not just their more visible role. ( )