Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

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Customer reviews

review by: mikulaj date: 2008-02-21 rating:
Slightly less than the title suggests.
This is a valuable history of the closing stages of the {first?} "Cold War" - concentrating particularly on the Reagan/Gorbachev encounters and the resulting agreements to reduce strategic and tactical weapons in Europe. Written in Richard Rhode's usual authoritative style, with copious references to source documents and many personal interviews with some of the surviving protagonists on both sides, my only reservation is that the book concentrates on the 'end' of the Nuclear Arms Race, rather than on it's making, as one might have inferred from the title. Yes, the author mentions both superpowers' native Military Industrial Complexes as being among the prime reasons for sustaining the billions/trillions of dollars expenditure over some fifty years, but the book doesn't really give any detailed history of the major developments during that period - e.g. the misleading claims made by various American presidential candidates {of both parties} during the 1950's over the so-called 'missile gap', which lead to a vast accelaration in the numbers of nuclear delivery systems and warheads by the time of the 1962 Cuban crisis.
Where the book really does score, and where it's historic relevance extends right up to the present, is that it highlights the extremely pervasive negative influences of some of the people surrounding Reagan -e.g. Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld - who simply couldn't accept the notion of nuclear parity, or the point of any effective reductions in the massive overkill potential of the superpowers, and tried to sabotage the negotiations at every step. Unfortunately these same people came back to even more influential positions in George W. Bush's administratiions, and as Richard Rhodes just stops short of pointing-out too explicitly, were largely responsible for the nature of the US military responses around the world since 9/11.

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