In addition (in a harbinger of things to come), 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. Rhodes points out that the Reagan 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.” Political concerns also have played a large role in nuclear arms accumulation.

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 a sufficient quantity of such weapons can make us secure.” That is, unlike conventional weapons, nuclear weapons are so qualitatively different in terms of both short and long term effects, that a strictly quantitative comparison is not valid. 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.” had superior numbers of strategic nuclear bombs and warheads. He demonstrates that throughout the entire Cold War period, the U.S. Beginning 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.

Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes