ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, by Richard Rhodes. Knopf, 400 pp.


While Richard Rhodes was working on The Making of the Atomic Bomb - a book that would win three major awards following its publication in 1986 and establish him as the definitive popular historian of the nuclear age - the world very nearly came to an end.

Rhodes did not know it at the time. Very few people did, until recently. And it can still be rather difficult to wrap one's mind around the literal truth of that statement. The incident is worth recalling as part of the context for the story Rhodes tells in Arsenals of Folly, the third volume in what has become an epic work of nonfiction narrative. (Dark Sun, from 1995, recounted the development of the H-bomb.)

It all happened in the fall of 1983. NATO was conducting a war game called Able Archer, in which military officers played out their response to a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. This was a routine exercise. But the timing was almost literally disastrous. Spooked by Ronald Reagan's saber-rattling, the Kremlin suspected that the Americans might be trying to trick them. They feared that a first strike might be launched under the cover of a simulation.

This was mistaken but not entirely paranoid. Such a fake-out scenario had been worked up by Western strategists, as the KGB probably knew. As Able Archer unfolded, the Soviets' tensions escalated to a point just shy of blind panic.

Buttons were almost pushed. Only well afterward did the CIA get some clue that the situation had nearly gone to the point of no return.

"The United States and the Soviet Union, apes on a treadmill, inadvertently blundered close to nuclear war in November 1983," Rhodes says. "That, and not the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, was the return on the neoconservatives' long, cynical and radically partisan investment in threat inflation and arms-race escalation."

The neocon wiz kids play an important part in Arsenals of Folly. Figures such as Richard Perle and Dick Cheney appear on the scene, bearing bogus estimates concerning the enemy's weaponry, as if to perfect their craft. But they are not quite at the center of the book, even as villains. That role is played, rather, by the weapons themselves.

In Rhodes' telling, nukes possess a terrible power beyond that of unimaginable destruction: They can also cloud men's minds. The arms buildup resulted from "a category mistake," he writes, "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. They are not, and they cannot."

Several chapters sketch how American and Soviet leaders stockpiled nuclear arsenals until each side could have destroyed the world several times over. Even the telling acronym for the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction can hardly do justice to the deranged rationalizations this process entailed.

I say that Rhodes "sketches" this buildup (and the halfhearted, easily derailed efforts to control it) because the subtitle to his book is rather misleading. Arsenals is not an account of the "the making of the nuclear arms race," as such. Its treatment of the history of the Cold War is, on the whole, quite perfunctory; and it skips the details of missile systems and treaties that would make for a much longer, much duller book.

Its central story, rather, is how the Soviet-American escalation came to an end in the wake of Able Archer and two other developments during the 1980s. One was the meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 - an incident giving East and West alike a very small taste of what fallout would be like. The other decisive moment was the 1983 airing of "The Day After" - arguably the most important made-for-TV movie in the history of the human species.

Ronald Reagan - who, to put it one way, processed things best when presented on film - got a sneak preview. Its fictional treatment of life following a thermonuclear exchange shook the president up, hardening him against his more Strangelovean advisers. He became convinced it was his mission to end the threat of nuclear war.

The developing rapport between Reagan and Gorbachev, reconstructed at length in Arsenals of Folly, is familiar from other accounts of their summits published during the past decade. But Rhodes performs the remarkable feat of reconstructing all the niggling, the misunderstanding, the moments of obtuseness (especially from Reagan's obsession with his Strategic Defense Initiative boondoggle, aka "Star Wars") in a way that proves dramatic precisely in its repetitiveness and frustration.

The result of that process was a de-escalation of the arms race that can be regarded as a happy ending only by ignoring the consequences of the Soviet Union's breakup: the devolution of central control over its nuclear stockpile. I've seen Arsenals of Folly referred to as the final segment of a trilogy, which is odd. The author clearly indicates that he will need another volume to cover efforts to cope with post-Cold War proliferation.

"Each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time," as former Defense secretary Robert McNamara tells Rhodes about the nuclear buildup. "But the result was insane." The most important implication of this gripping book is that McNamara's insight does not apply only to yesteryear.