Jack Kelly  writer


APOCALYPTIC ACCUMULATION: A HISTORY OF THE
NUCLEAR ARMS RACE
                                       (AmericanHeritage.com)

In  Richard Rhodes’ latest book Arsenals of Folly: The
Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Knopf), folly is the
operative word. Rhodes masterfully dissects the decades of
reckless and misguided policy decisions that led the United
States and the Soviet Union to expand their nuclear arsenals
beyond all logic.
By the mid-1980s the total world nuclear stockpile amounted
to 50,000 bombs and warheads – an explosive power 1.5
million times that of the bomb that flattened Hiroshima. “A few
hundred of the fifty thousand could destroy not only the
United States, the Soviet Union and their allies,” Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara admitted later, “but, through
atmospheric effects, a major part of the rest of the world as
well.”
“What fears and ambitions had justified such an apocalyptic
accumulation?” asks Rhodes, whose earlier volumes detailed
the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. His current
book gives intriguing insights into the complex answer.
The race began during World War II when the Americans and
British decided not to share with their Soviet allies the fact
that they were developing an atomic bomb. After the war, in
spite of warnings from scientists about the expensive futility
of deploying thermonuclear weapons, President Truman
decided to go ahead with the “super-bomb.” To fund the
project he increased the defense budget four fold and largely
uncoupled it from fiscal policy – we would have the weapons
whatever they cost. Soon, almost 7 percent of U.S. electric
power was being devoted to atomic weapons. As predicted,
the Soviets quickly followed suit.
The U.S. maintained a decisive lead in nuclear capability
through the early 1960s. Framers of a 1961 war fighting plan
estimated that a full-blown atomic strike would kill 285 million
Soviet and Chinese citizens. Some experts calculated the
deaths at two to three times that figure.
While the country’s arsenal of missiles and bombers seemed
sufficient protection, the U.S. Navy wanted in on the action
too. A third leg was added – the military began to deploy
ballistic missiles on submarines in 1960. “This triad, which
has been sanctified as a prudent redundancy vital to
effective deterrence,” Rhodes writes, “was nothing of the
kind: it was an artifact of interservice rivalries.”
The Cuban Missile Crisis exposed the Soviet Union’s weak
nuclear position and prompted its leaders to rectify the
situation. They began a massive arms buildup that would last
more than a decade. The U.S. responded by developing
multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs),
which allowed each missile to deliver bombs to several
different targets. The overwrought race lost all sense.
“The bitter U.S. political debates of the 1970s and early
1980s about nuclear strategy,” Rhodes observes, “. . .  
hinged on arguments as divorced from reality as the debates
of medieval scholars about the characteristics of seraphim
and cherubim.” He quotes McNamara again saying, “Each
individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time.
But the result was insane.”
Insane because though each side prepared to respond to a
massive first strike, neither side intended to launch one.
Much of the build-up in both camps resulted from domestic
politics. “There was always political capital to be earned from
exaggerating the dangers or benefits of any particular
nuclear strategy or weapons system,” Rhodes notes.
The author documents how threat inflation became a cottage
industry, beginning with the “missile gap” notion of the late
1950s, which vastly exaggerated the Soviets’ arsenal. The
fear mongers included high ranking Defense Department
officials like Paul Nitze, Democratic hawks like Senator Scoop
Jackson, and future neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, and Donald Rumsfeld. For years they
opposed detente and tried to head off meaningful arms
limitations while they pressed for increased defense
spending. Arms control efforts were further stymied by the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Rhodes takes a detailed look at what proved to be the last
act of the arms race during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Jimmy Carter had begun a serious arms building program in
response to the Afghanistan invasion; Ronald Reagan
continued it and steadily amplified his rhetoric against the
USSR. Soviet leaders became convinced the Americans were
planning a first strike. When the two countries came close to
war during a 1983 NATO military exercise, Rhodes notes,
“Reagan was surprised and shocked that the Soviets had
taken his years of militant rhetoric and his massive arms
buildup seriously.”
Rhodes denies that “the United States drove the Soviet
Union to reign in its imperial ambitions by outspending it.”
Instead, it was Reagan’s efforts to reach accommodation with
Mikhail Gorbachev during Reagan’s second term that helped
give Gorbachev the political room at home to introduce the
reforms leading to the transformation and finally dissolution
of the Soviet Union.
Reagan was genuinely determined to end the arms race, in
spite of being surrounded by naysayers. “Far from being
signs of weakness,” Rhodes writes, “Reagan’s fear of nuclear
war and his determination to reduce its risks measured his
maturity as a human being.”
Rhodes gives a blow-by-blow account of Reagan’s October
1986 meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. The
author’s deftly painted character portraits – he mentions
Gorbachev’s “southern Russian accent and hillbilly grammar”
– make for a smooth narrative. The Soviet leader had been
shaken by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident earlier
that year. Though its impact was only one-third that of the
smallest nuclear explosive, the disaster had contaminated
half of Europe and hinted at the devastation that would
accompany a nuclear war. The incident, Foreign Minister
Eduard Shevardnadze wrote, “tore the blindfold from our
eyes.”
American negotiators had experienced no similar revelation
and Reagan’s aides managed to frustrate real progress
toward arms reduction in spite of Gorbachev’s substantial
concessions. “Gorbachev wanted change,” Rhodes writes.
“Most of Reagan’s advisers did not.”
Reagan also obstructed the negotiations by insisting on his
Strategic Defense Initiative. Though the plan amounted to
little more than “a bloated research program,” Rhodes writes,
and was ultimately a costly failure, it blocked a
comprehensive agreement and in fact played into the hands
of Soviet hardliners by fueling their suspicions of a U.S. first
strike.
In spite of the disappointment of Reykjavik, Gorbachev
pushed forward with his reforms. In December 1988 he
announced at the United Nations significant and unilateral
Soviet cutbacks in conventional forces. Two months later, he
withdrew his army from Afghanistan. The Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty negotiated with the U.S. in 1990 finally
limited warheads and delivery vehicles. In 1991 the arms
race that had threatened the world since 1949 effectively
ended with a whimper.
Rhodes asserts that the arms buildup did not deter war –
neither the Russians nor the Americans ever planned to go
to war – nor did it bring the  nation security. “What we bought
for a waste of treasure unprecedented in human history,” he
writes, “was not peace nor even safety but a pervasive
decline in the capacity and clemency of American life.”  

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