Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Arsenals of Folly: The Making

of the Nuclear Arms Race

by Richard Rhodes

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(Knopf, $28.95)

An advisor to President John F. Kennedy once estimated that just 50 thermonuclear bombs, strategically aimed, would utterly destroy either American or Soviet society. At the peak of the arms race, those two superpowers possessed 65,000. “Mutual assured destruction” was supposed to guarantee caution. But that idea is laughable, says Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Rhodes. In November 1983, Soviet intelligence officials were so spooked by President Ronald Reagan’s belligerent rhetoric and unprecedented military spending that they mistakenly interpreted a routine U.S. war game as cover for a nuclear first strike. An overnight holocaust, writes Rhodes, was narrowly averted.

The disturbing lesson of Rhodes’ latest volume is that the keepers of those fearsome arsenals didn’t know what they were doing, said Gregg Herken in The Boston Globe. Not only did most maintain a risible faith that victory was possible in a nuclear war, but they depended on damage estimates that failed to take into account the toll from widespread fires and eventual nuclear winter. Rhodes’ uneven but at times “captivating” new book suggests it was luck rather than collective wisdom that enabled the superpowers to begin dismantling their nuclear stockpiles under Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, said Timothy Naftali in The New York Sun. In fact, despite its subtitle, Arsenals of Folly has much less to say about the decades-long arms race than it does about the race’s final act. For Gorbachev, the moral wake-up call apparently came with the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl. For Reagan, it was a White House screening of The Day After, a 1983 TV movie about a fictional nuclear strike on U.S. soil.

Unwisely, Rhodes tries to score partisan points, said Gabriel Schoenfeld in Commentary. Irate over today’s war in Iraq, the author has recast the entire history of the arms race as a one-sided exercise in fearmongering. Who, in Rhodes’ account, pushed the world toward that near-calamity of November 1983? None other than such latter-day Iraq hawks as Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. But Rhodes’ portrayal of the Reagan administration can also be seen as reassuring, said Jonathan Schell in The Nation. Surrounded by men suffering from a mass delusion, Reagan eventually turned against the arms race, proving that “a radical rethinking of the conventional wisdom” is always possible.