Of Nukes and Neocons

This review recently appeared in the San Jose Mercury News and the Houston Chronicle

ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
By Richard Rhodes
Knopf, 386 pp., $28.95
Richard Rhodes’ “Arsenals of Folly” is the continuation – if not the completion – of his saga of the nuclear age. It began in 1986 with “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” which won the Triple Crown of literary awards – Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award – and continued with “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb” in 1995. As a contribution to our understanding of the latter half of the twentieth century, Rhodes’ achievement is on a par with Taylor Branch’s “America in the King Years” trilogy and Robert Caro’s monumental ongoing biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.

“Arsenals of Folly” begins with a horrifying event: the explosion of Reactor Number Four at Chernobyl in April 1986, which propelled Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev toward nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev, even though Rhodes acknowledges he was “no saint,” is in some sense the hero of the book. This will irk conservatives who believe that it was Ronald Reagan who, by challenging the Soviet Union with the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, caused the collapse of that so-called “evil empire” and thereby ended the arms race. Rhodes dismisses that argument, but his view of Reagan is sympathetic: He sees him as a man of good heart but confused mind, whose stubborn belief in the Strategic Defense Initiative, the space-based nuclear-shield program nicknamed “star wars,” blocked his sincere desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

When Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Rhodes tells us, “the total world stockpile” of nuclear weapons was “about fifty thousand bombs and warheads with a combined explosive force of about 22,500 million tons of TNT equivalent (1.5 million Hiroshimas).” Rhodes sketches out the series of decisions over the preceding 40 years that created this terrible armory, and the conflicted and often conflicting personalities who made those decisions.

Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense for John F. Kennedy, took part in some of them, and played a key role in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, in which the world almost experienced a nuclear war. McNamara, Rhodes says, “has come to believe that nuclear weapons should be abolished,” and when asked why so many were built, told Rhodes, “Each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time. … But the result was insane.”

Others were less repentant. A good many of them – such familiar names as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes and Richard Perle – stuck around to carry Cold War attitudes into the United States’ current engagements in the Middle East. According to George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state, Perle, deputy secretary of defense under Reagan, argued that “The worst thing in the world would be to eliminate nuclear weapons.” And even as late as 1991, with the Soviet Union in collapse, Cheney, secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, resisted cuts in the nuclear arsenal, Rhodes reports, because “he distrusted arms negotiations and feared they would encourage reductions in the defense budget. He had already decided that there would be no peace dividend from the demise of the Soviet Union.”

But Rhodes concentrates on the two key players in the negotiations of the 1980s, Reagan and Gorbachev. Chernobyl was a major force driving Gorbachev to the negotiating table. Rhodes notes that the full effects of the reactor explosion have never come to light, that “despite the promises of glasnost, the number who died or were disabled has not been revealed.” But he provides a chilling metaphor for those effects: “When the leaves fell from the chestnut trees that are the glory of Kiev, proud on its high bluff above the Dnieper River, they had to be raked up, all three hundred thousand tons of them, baled and buried outside the city as low-level nuclear waste.”

Reagan’s interest in nuclear disarmament may have had a very different inspiration. In October 1983, at Camp David, Reagan screened an advance copy of the TV movie “The Day After,” about the effects of a nuclear war on a town in Kansas. In his diary, Reagan wrote that it “left me greatly depressed. … we have to do all we can … to see that there is never a nuclear war.” Rhodes comments that “Reagan was famously responsive to stories told on film.” He asserts that the movie dovetailed with Reagan’s fundamentalist belief that Armageddon was at hand. Chernobyl played its role here, too. The name, Reagan was told, means “wormwood” – which in Revelation is the name of a star that falls on the Earth, causing great destruction. Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser, told Reagan biographer Lou Cannon that the president saw “himself as a romantic, heroic figure” with “the power of a hero to overcome even Armageddon.”

And so the two leaders of the world’s superpowers met, one of them inspired by the harsh reality of a nuclear explosion, the other by fiction, myth and prophecy, to end the arms race. A conclusion would be frustrated by Reagan’s stubborn resistance to dismantling “star wars” – and also by the resistance of his neoconservative advisers to diminishing American power. It was achieved finally by the economic and political forces that undermined the Soviet Union.

Rhodes, who lives in Half Moon Bay and is an affiliate of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, gives us a detailed and dramatic account of the Reagan-Gorbachev talks. He also weaves this story into a devastating commentary on the perilous nature of the nuclear arms race, bringing home his conviction that “there has never been a realistic military justification for accumulating large, expensive stockpiles of nuclear arms. In the United States the pressures to do so, seldom acknowledged publicly, have been primarily political, bureaucratic, economic, and palliative.”

As the third book in a series, neatly forming a trilogy, “Arsenals of Folly” may have the look of a conclusion. But Rhodes notes that there are further stories to be told. The need of the United States to deal with “a crowd of nuclear-armed successor states” to the Soviet Union is “another story for another book,” he comments, as is the pressure for “nuclear abolition.” And at the end of this book he notes the deleterious effects of out-of-balance defense spending on the economy, on education, housing, health care and the infrastructure. When levees crumble in New Orleans and a bridge collapses in Minneapolis, we count once again the cost of the arms race.