Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes
Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes
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Arsenals of Folly
The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Author: Richard Rhodes

Narrator: Robertson Dean

Unabridged: 14 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/09/2007

Synopsis

From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war–and then nearly agreed to abolish nuclear weapons.

In a narrative that moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration’s unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan’s famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes’s detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before.

Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation, memoir literature, and oral history that has become available only in the past ten years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War that led to its dramatic end. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising–a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.

About The Author

Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of 22 books, including The Twilight of the Bomb, the last volume in a quartet about nuclear history. The first, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, won the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.  He has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television's Frontline and American Experience series. An affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, he lectures frequently to audiences in the United States and abroad. Robertson Dean has acted on- and off-Broadway and in many leading roles at regional theaters throughout the United States. His film work includes Star Trek: Nemesis and Vanilla Sky.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jonathan on February 27, 2008

Rhodes offers a compelling, authoritative and often depressing account of the Cold War nuclear arms race. He challenges the prevailing American view that increased U.S. defense spending, along with SDI, drove the Soviets to the bargaining table. Rather, Gorbachev had long understood that the Soviet......more

Goodreads review by Jon on July 01, 2019

As Reagan and Gorbachev stood, diametrically opposed on the ban of space-based arms, a member of the Soviet delegation pleaded with the men, prophesying if future generations were to realize they had come within a single word, that day, of an agreement to rid the world of nuclear weapons but failed,......more

Goodreads review by Ushan on December 27, 2010

This is the last volume in the author's trilogy about nuclear weapons; The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) described the American atomic bomb project, and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995) the Soviet atomic bomb project and both nations' thermonuclear bomb projects. This book is abou......more

Goodreads review by Josh on December 29, 2008

Richard Rhodes should stick to science writing. While he can lucidly explain a scientific idea in colloquial terms, he does not have the ability or the stomach to lay out policy arguments, as his moralizing gets in the way.......more

Goodreads review by Richard on March 29, 2013

Richard Rhodes has published two previous books, about the making of the Atomic Bomb and the making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Implicit in these subjects is the question of what happened after the events which brought these weapons of mass destruction into the world. The ensuing buildup of nuclear arsena......more

Quotes

“Every age finds the writers it needs, and the nuclear age has found Richard Rhodes.”
-The Nation

“Throughout his assiduously researched work, Rhodes cites stunning statistics to support his contention that the nuclear competition has run amok . . . dense with crucial, revealing information obtained from personal interviews and newly declassified documents, Rhodes’s Arsenals of Folly is a dramatic and penetrating investigation of the nuclear arms race and its eventual end.”
-The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A terrifying overview of the global potential for killing.”
-The Economist

“Rhodes performs the remarkable feat of reconstructing all the niggling, the misunderstanding, the moments of obtuseness in a way that proves dramatic precisely in its repetitiveness and frustration.”
-Newsday

“His artful narrative contains some real gems.”
-New York Times Book Review

“Highly detailed and gripping . . . a chilling conclusion.”
-Scientific American

“Rich and riveting . . . a splendid writer . . . harrowing.”
-Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Using an impressive range of sources, clean writing and a clear sense of the dramatic, Rhodes triumphs.”
-Rocky Mountain News

“As a contribution to our understanding of the latter half of the 20th century, Rhodes’s 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.”
-The Mercury News (San Jose, CA)

“Rhodes is not only an outstanding researcher and historian, he is a superb writer who enraptures the reader with a gripping narrative. Upon reading this important book, one will walk away ruminating on the unspeakable horror of the nuclear apocalypse that was, it often seems miraculously, avoided during the Cold War.”
-The Sunday Star-Ledger

“Stylistically, Arsenals of Folly is often quite distinguished. The impressive opening chapter–which describe the Chernobyl disaster in a controlled but morbidly involving tone–is an achievement . . . as an allegory of manipulated intelligence, miscalculation, and fatal ideology, it is alarmingly relevant.”
-The Tennessean

“No finer manual for learning from the mistakes of our past than [this] valuable book.”
-Seed magazine

“Detailed and dramatic . . . devastating commentary on the perilous nature of the nuclear arms race.”
-Houston Chronicle

“Intriguing insight . . . Rhodes masterfully dissects decades of what he considers reckless and misguided policy decisions that led the United States and the Soviet Union to expand their nuclear arsenals beyond all logic . . . The author’s deftly painted character portraits–he mentions Gorbachev’s “southern Russian accent and hillbilly grammar”–make for an engrossing narrative.”
-The American Heritage

“Absorbing . . . “
-The Seattle Times

“With skillful insight, Richard Rhodes has woven accounts by Soviet and American insiders into a dark and troubling history of superpower insanity. He makes you wonder when we'll wake up, since some of the American villains keep coming back to haunt us: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle.”
-David Shipler, Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams

“Richard Rhodes, our leading historian of nuclear weapons, has written a powerful, clear-eyed account of the nuclear arms race, focusing on Mikhail Gorbachev as the heroic figure in the history of mankind’s 20th Century flirtation with oblivion. Rhodes gives the still-neglected happy ending to that flirtation the sweeping, insightful, and compelling treatment it deserves. So yes, this is an “important” book, but it reads like a political thriller.”
-Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened

“Compelling . . . an insightful chronicle of epoch-shaping events.”
-Booklist

"Rhodes accomplishes what neither American nor Soviet political cultures could manage over a half-century of nuclear cold war–to find the flesh-and-blood human reality on both sides. Rich with revelation, insight and detail, riveting as a powerful novel, Arsenals of Folly is transcendent history, haunting our memory and experience."
-Roger Morris, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America

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