another Rhodes book

As a fan of Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I could hardly resist picking up his Arsenals of Folly from the sale table on campus, his book about the nuclear arms race. I have no time to read anything cover-to-cover right now that isn’t directly work-related, but I’ve been flipping through it. Some immediate points of note:

*Rhodes does argue that misunderstandings around “Operation Able Archer,” a NATO exercise in fall 1983, nearly did lead to Soviet tactical nuclear strikes against West Germany.

*Rhodes presents a mostly negative but somewhat nuanced picture of Ronald Reagan. And he offers the tidbit that the movie “The Day After,” which I found hopelessly banal as a 15-year-old at the time, scared the wits out of Reagan, who as a B-movie actor was deeply impressed by the portrayal of issues in films, and moved him on a disarmament course.

*It was right around this time (immediately following the heated controversy over the Korean Airliner shootdown) that the Soviet missile commander luckily ignored false images of an incoming American missile strike, though if Rhodes deals with that incident I haven’t found it yet just by flipping through.

By the way, our library in Cairo has an interesting book… NATO’s late 1970’s fictionalized version of an American-Soviet war in Europe in the early 1980’s. It sheds much interesting light on what they expected to happen. I don’t remember the cause of war they imagined. But the Soviets come through the Fulda Gap in Germany as expected, NATO retreats to the Rhine as planned, and when the Soviet offensive stalls they nuke Birmingham just out of spite. NATO nukes Minsk in response. And then the Soviet government collapses.