Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

by: Richard Rhodes

Published by: Vintage Books

Reviewed by Nick Capo, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois College

With the success of his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize, Richard Rhodes established his reputation as an authority on the nuclear-weapons history of the United States. Arsenals of Folly will strengthen that reputation. It is a superb book: well researched, told with riveting narrative flair, and consistently unsettling in its challenges to common assumptions about U.S. history.

Rhodes skillfully weaves two narrative strands—an account of the Reagan-Gorbachev years and a history of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race—into a story that should be required reading for members of Congress and voting citizens. Readers watch history unfolding as two proud nations push to the brink of bankruptcy and beyond pursuing policies and an arms race that, as Rhodes carefully documents, far too many politicians, military leaders, and diplomats knew were nonsensical.

The only winners in this book are the underappreciated people who injected some sanity into the deliberations, a diverse group that included Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Shultz, Eduard Shevardnadze, and others. Shultz deserves praise for blocking attempts by radicals to derail diplomatic negotiations between Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev, asking his people in front of the Soviets “Are you out of your mind? This is what it’s about. The longer they talk, the better it is.”

Arsenals of Folly is a devastating critique of what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” and the deeply flawed policies it sustained in the Soviet Union and the United States.

Near the book’s end, Rhodes uses business leaders, scholars, and civil engineers to show the negative price the U.S. has paid for the nuclear-arms race and bluntly states his final conclusion: “Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear-arms race and the corresponding militarization of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national-security state that held the entire human world hostage.”

One year later, with the U.S. economy in the worst shape since World War II, Rhodes’ prescient analysis cuts even deeper.

Armchair Interviews says: Arsenals of Folly is highly recommended.

Author’s Web site: http://www.ERichardRhodes.com