Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
Written by Richard Rhodes
Narrated by Robertson Dean
4/5
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Currently unavailable
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About this audiobook
In a narrative that moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan's famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes's detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current "war on terror" and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before.
Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation, memoir literature, and oral history that has become available only in the past ten years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War that led to its dramatic end. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising-a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.
From the Compact Disc edition.
Richard Rhodes
<p>Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for <em>The Making of the Atomic Bomb</em>, Richard Rhodes has also won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Prize, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ford, and MacArthur foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of a dozen books amd more than seventy articles and lives in rural Connecticut with his wife, writer and pilot Ginger Rhodes.</p>
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Reviews for Arsenals of Folly
59 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoyed this history of the Arms Race (albeit focusing on the end of it, particularly on Gorbachev) and would definitely recommend it. The author makes the reader consider what it all was worth - to put the world on the brink of destruction for so long at such a great cost.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A fascinating history of the nuclear arms race and the cold war. One gets a sense for the extremely tense and paranoid atmosphere that the atomic bomb created. It's a history of held breath, everyone tensed, waiting, and terrified. Truly chilling to think that one wrong move might have ended life as we know it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is one of the best histories I have read in a very long time. Rhodes uses nuclear weapons policy as the lens through which he views the Cold War. His discussion of Gorbachev is quite interesting and well done, but his detailed account of how Gorbachev and Reagan negotiated the INF and START reductions is simply amazing in its detail and clarity. This is a must read book, especially for those too young to remember what it was like to live with the threat of nuclear annihilation.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Richard Rhodes completes his trilogy with this history of the nuclear arms race, after writing The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. This third nonfiction work is not quite the engrossing drama of the first two. The first chapter is a great essay of the nuclear power plant eruption at Chernobel, Ukraine in 1986. The accident was caused by operator errors, running a test while the unit was producing full power, the lack of a containment vessel encasing the nuclear fission generator and the wholesale mismanagement of the power plant once the accident occurred. At this point the tale slows down considerably with a biography of Gorbachev and additional background of the Russian leaders and American Presidents that were at the center of the strategies for escalating the multitude of nuclear weapons by each power.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The 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 (particuarly 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5There'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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beginning 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 Regan 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 manuipulation 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 wonderful and appropriate that Rhodes ends his book with a quote from Robert Oppenheimer, whose opposition to a nuclear arms build-up cost him 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.” And now we continue, he laments, “to claim an old and derelict sovereignty that the weapons themselves deny.” In fact, a recent article in Slate (“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. Read this book, and vote the military cabal out of office!(JAF)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This 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.