Seeking the underlying motivation behind an overzealous arms race

"Arsenals of Folly:

The Making of the

Nuclear Arms Race"

by Richard Rhodes

Knopf, 400 pp., $28.95

"If you go on with this nuclear arms race," Winston Churchill said in 1954, "all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce."

The overkill factor was ridiculous even then. Just a few years later, the stockpile had become so large that the destruction of Hiroshima could have been duplicated more than a million times. The final cost of the arms race, begun in 1949, was somewhere between $5.5 trillion and $10 trillion.

Robert McNamara, the Cold War warrior who now thinks nuclear weapons should be abolished, remembered how the buildup happened when he talked to Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes ("The Making of the Atomic Bomb").

"Each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time," he said. "But the result was insane."

Rhodes' absorbing new book, "Arsenals of Folly," tries to explain "what fears and ambitions had justified such an apocalyptic accumulation." He tries to get at the root of the problem by profiling influential Soviet and American leaders.

Paul Nitze, an American diplomat who spent five decades involved in U.S. security strategy, thought the firebombing of Tokyo was worse than what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rhodes thinks Nitze's study of the nuked cities "impressed him perhaps less than they should have" and may have led to nuclear redundancy.

Rhodes goes back to Nitze's gang-ridden childhood to establish a motivation. The lesson he may have learned from Chicago street life: "Surround yourself with overwhelming force."

Unfounded fears and fantasies have often played a large part in the nuclear buildup, from the phony "missile gap" that helped elect John F. Kennedy to the elusive nukes of Saddam Hussein. Because Kennedy had made such a big deal about the "gap" during his campaign, he was obliged to order up a fleet of Minutemen once he became president.

President Ronald Reagan believed deeply in a missile defense shield dubbed the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars") that was eventually abandoned. Cost to taxpayers: $44 billion. (Later presidents provided billions more for similar projects, but they didn't call them SDI.)

According to Rhodes, Reagan's saber-rattling nearly led to another Cuban Missile Crisis in 1983. Reagan is portrayed as being "surprised and shocked" that his frequent "threat displays" (violations of Soviet air space) bothered the Russians. They may have led to the horrific 1983 Soviet attack on a Korean airliner that killed more than 200 civilians.

By 1986, Reagan enjoyed better relations with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose experiences with nuclear disaster at Chernobyl gave him a fresh appreciation of the dangers of fallout.

At least 13 serious powerplant accidents had preceded Chernobyl in the Soviet Union — all kept secret — but this one was so destructive that the world could not help noticing. By beginning the book with Chernobyl, Rhodes emphasizes how crucial it was to the Gorbachev/Reagan arms talks.

Those talks become so repetitive that they threaten to suffocate the final stretch of "Arsenals of Folly," which is dominated by Reagan's obsession with SDI and Gorbachev's attempts to get around it. Not until late 1991, with the Soviet Union collapsing and the first President Bush in office, did the arms race end, in Rhodes' words, "after 42 dangerous years."

Rhodes concludes that the cost of the arms race amounted to "a waste of treasure unprecedented in human history." What's worse, perhaps, is that there has been "no reasonable gain in security."