Arsenals Of Folly By Richard Rhodes
Posted at 10:47AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008
Arsenals of Folly
ISBN: 9781847371188
Richard Rhodes has a fine pedigree as a nuclear historian. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) won the Pulitzer Prize and remains the definitive history of the subject. Dark Sun (1995) was an equally exhaustive and compelling study of the next generation of nukes, the H-bombs. His latest work shows how the arms race accelerated out of control in the cold war. By the mid-1980s, the superpowers had 50,000 nuclear weapons. A few hundred such superweapons were more than enough to wipe out most of the world. Rhodes examines the "fears and ambitions" that led to this "apocalyptic accumulation". One shocking reason is that they were cheap - about $250,000 each, a lot less than a new bomber. Threat inflation and the "vast, glittering malevolence" of the theory of deterrence all helped bring the world to the brink of mutual-assured destruction, surely the most apt acronym of the era: MAD. But one voice is strangely absent from this otherwise excellent history - that of the anti-nuclear protesters.
Guardian review
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