Richard Rhodes: Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007, Knopf)

This is Rhodes' third book on nuclear weapons, following The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the latter including the early Soviet efforts to join the arms race. Two great books, exactly where to start to learn anything (and pretty much everything) about the strange beauty and terror of nuclear weapons. This book largely completes the story, covering the subsequent arms race, the fitful attempts to rein it in, and the general absurdity of trying to pretend that these bombs are anything but Weapons of Mass Suicide. In typing up these quotes, I'm particularly struck by the political folly of the neocons, and for that matter the long line of trigger-happy anti-communists from Kennan and Nitze up through PNAC.

Extraordinary book.

No page number, just a quote on the opening page, from old-time conservative Peter Viereck:

Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away.

To the Chernobyl Sarcophagus (pp. 5-7):

At 2:30 on Saturday afternoon someone finally called the institute to report an accident at Chernobyl. In the early hours after midnight, Chernobyl Reactor Number Four had run away in four seconds from 7 percent of maximum rated power to about one hundred times maximum rated power, an event called a prompt critical excursion that had flashed the reactor's thousands of gallons of circulating water to high-pressure steam. The graphite core of the massive, concrete-encased reactor was an enclosed cylinder forty feet in diameter and twenty-three feet tall, set on end, with blocks of concrete and a water pool beneath it to absorb the fierce radiation its zirconium-clad uranium fuel elements produced, and a two-million-pound disk-shaped upper biological shield of concrete blocks set over it like a lid to protect workers from radiation exposure. In the same spirit of bravado that had prompted the scientists at Los Alamos during the Second World War to nickname the atomic bomb they were building the "gadget," the men who operated the RBMKs called the upper biological shield the pyatachok, Russian for one of the smallest Soviet coins, the five-kopek piece. When the water flashed to superheated steam and the reactor's steam pipes started exploding, an eyewitness reported later, the pyatachok "began to bubble and dance."

Then two explosions in the space of less than four seconds tore open the reactor and blew out the building. The reactor core was sealed within a metal tank filled with a mixture of helium and nitrogen to prevent the graphite moderator -- four million pounds of pure carbon -- from burning. The prompt critical excursion had heated the graphite red hot. The first steam explosion lifted the two-million-pound pyatachok. At the same time the steam burst down through the metal tank and penetrated the red-hot graphite. Steam combines ferociously with hot carbon to make carbon monoxide, liberating hydrogen; the second and more powerful explosion combined steam and exploding hydrogen gas, tilted up the pyatachok nearly vertical, shattered the upper half of the reactor core, and blew tons of its red-hot radioactive debris -- a rubble of highly irradiated uranium-oxide fuel as well as radioactive graphite and zirconium -- past the pyatachok, through the roof, and half a mile into the air.

It fell out by size. Big blocks of hot graphite landed on the roofs of Number Four's turbine hall and Reactor Number Three. To lower construction costs, the roofs had been covered with flammable asphalt; the hot graphite set them on fire. Blocks and smaller pieces of graphite landed on the grounds around the building and splashed hissing intot he four-mile-long cooling pond that lay between the plant and the Pripyat River. The cooling pond was fed by and drained into the river, which drained in turn into the big reservoir downstream that stored the water supply of the city of Kiev, the Soviet Union's third-largest city, with a population of some 2.5 million people.

Graphite pieces and soot-like particles scattered across a stand of pines southeast of the complex; several weeks later, when the radiation had killed the trees and their chlorophyll had faded, people started calling the dead stand "the Red Forest." About half the total radioactive fission products jettisoned from the reactor fell within a two-mile radius of the building. The gases released in the explosion diluted and dispersed into the upper atmosphere, but the wind carried the finest aerosols and hot, intensely radioactive particles (which lofted on their own heat like microscopic hot-air balloons) northwest toward Minsk, on to Ingalina and then across the Baltic Sea to Finland and Sweden. The explosions also blew out the shield elements below the reactor; with the water channels through the graphite blocks drained, the hot graphite chimneyed air up the channels through the remaining lower half of the reactor core and the graphite began to burn. It turned efficiently, the soot and ash carrying more and more radiation high into the air.

A containment structure such as the concrete-and-steel dome that protects all Western and Japanese power reactors would probably have confined the Chernobyl explosions and their radioactivity, but Soviet reactors of the RBMK type lacked such containment.

In the 1950s, when the RBMK design was developed and approved, Soviet industry had not yet mastered the technology necessary to manufacture steel pressure vessels capacious enough to surround such large reactor cores. For that reason, among others, scientists, engineers, and managers in the Soviet nuclear-power industry had pretended for years that a loss-of-coolant accident was unlikely to the point of impossibility in an RBMK. They knew better. The industry had been plagued with disasters and near-disasters since its earliest days. All of them had been covered up, treated as state secrets; information about them was denied not only to the Soviet public but even to the industry's managers and operators. Engineering is based on experience, including operating experience; treating design flaws and accidents as state secrets meant that every other similar nuclear-power station remained vulnerable and unprepared.

Unknown to the Soviet public and the world, at least thirteen serious power-reactor accidents had occurred in the Soviet Union before the one at Chernobyl. Between 1964 and 1979, for example, repeated fuel-assembly fires plagued Reactor Number One at the Beloyarsk nuclear-power plant east of the Urals near Novosibirsk. In 1975, the core of an RBMK reactor at the Leningrad plant partly melted down; cooling the core by flooding it with liquid nitrogen led to a discharge of radiation into the environment equivalent to about one-twentieth the amount that was released at Chernobyl in 1986. In 1982, a rupture of the central fuel assembly of Chernobyl Reactor Number One released radioactivity over the nearby bedroom community of Pripyat, now in 1986 once again exposed and at risk. In 1985, a steam relief valve burst during a shaky startup of Reactor Number One at the Balakovo nuclear-power plant, on the Volga River about 150 miles southwest of Samara, jetting 500-degree steam that scalded to death fourteen members of the start-up staff; despite the accident, the responsible official, Balakovo's plant director, Viktor Bryukhanov, was promoted to supervise construction at Chernobyl and direct its operation.

(p. 16):

The RBMK reactor was a dual-use design. It was developed in the 1950s as a production reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, then adapted for civilian power operation in the 1970s; like its graphite core, its pyatachok was punctured with multiple channels from which irradiated fuel rods could be removed via an overhead crane while the reactor was operating. If the military needed plutonium, on-line refueling would allow fuel rods to be removed early to maximize their bloom of military-grade plutonium. A safety containment structure around such a reactor, which would probably have prevented an accident like the one at Chernobyl, would have also greatly reduced its military value. Military needs thus competed with civilian needs in the choice of the RBMK design when the Soviet Union decided to greatly expand electricity production with nuclear power in the early 1970s; a competing light-water reactor design, the Soviet VVER, was safer but less suitable for the production of military-grade plutonium. The RBMK design was adapted for civilian use primarily for economic and logistic reasons -- the concrete and graphite reactors drew on different industrial resources than the steel VVERs did -- but their dual-use potential weighted the decision as well. From the perspective of the Politburo's old guard, then, publicly discussing an accident at a Soviet nuclear power plant, especially one that revealed such serious design flaws, would be no less subversive than revealing the location and fitness of an army in the middle of a war.

(pp. 24-25):

The struggle to deal with the fallout of radionuclides that had contaminated large areas of Soviet territory continued through the summer and fall and across the next winter. When the leaves fell from the chestnut trees that are the glory of Kiev, proud on its high bluff above the Dnieper River, they had to be raked up, all three hundred thousand tons of them, baled and buried outside the city as low-level nuclear waste. "Liquidators" by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps half a million in all -- 340,000 soldiers, many of them recently returned from service in Afghanistan, new draftees, minor government employees such as teachers and inspectors -- were pressed into service and took their brief turn scraping away topsoil, paving over roads, spraying plastic coatings onto schoolyards and fallow fields, burying gardens, houses, equipment, wells. "We buried the forest," one of them told Alexievich. "We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves. . . . It was just your average Russian chaos. That's how we live." In November 1986, after a heroic effort, workers finished entombing Reactor Number Four within a sarcophagus made of half a million cubic yards of reinforced concrete, and only then did it cease releasing radiation into the environment.

"More than 500 residential communities, nearly 60,000 buildings and structures, and several tens of millions of square meters of exposed surfaces of technological equipment and internal surfaces at the [nuclear-power plant] itself have been decontaminated," Colonel-General Vladimir Pikalov of the U.S.S.R. Chemical Forces summarized a year later. "Tens of thousands of cubic meters of contaminated soil has been removed and the same amount brought in and several thousand insulating screens have been laid down. Dust has been suppressed on vast territories and several thousand samples have been taken for radioactive isotope analysis."

Shevardnadze came to call 26 April 1986 "Chernobyl Day." It "tore the blindfold from our eyes," he wrote later. It tore the blindfold as well from the eyes of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens living in the western Soviet Union. "Chernobyl happened," a Byelorussian biologist told Alexievich, "and suddenly you got this new feeling, we weren't used to it, that everyone had his separate life. Until then no one needed this life. But now you had to think: what are you eating, what are you feeding your kids? What' dangerous, what isn't? Should you move to another place, or should you stay? Everyone had to make her own decisions. And we were used to living -- how? As an entire village, as a collective -- a factory, a kolkhoz [i.e., a collective farm]. We were Soviet people, collectivized. . . . Then we changed. Everything changed."

Eastern Europe changed. The European Community banned imports of Soviet, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian agricultural products worth $500 million annually as of 7 May 1986, inflicting great economic hardship on populations already restive in response to Gorbachev's relaxation of authoritarian control. Ironically, the purpose of recent Soviet nuclear-power development had been to increase electrical capacity available to Eastern Europe. "The decision to accelerate the nuclear-energy program had been taken in 1974," Zhores Medvedev explains, "when the international price of oil rose sharply and export demand increased. Oil became the main source of foreign exchange after 1974. Poor [Soviet] harvests meant that large imports of grain and food were necessary. As a result, the replacement of oil by nuclear energy became a priority." More than any other natural resource, oil propped up the stagnant Soviet economy, but the oil the Soviet Union supplied to Eastern Europe went at subsidized rates. Replacing most of that oil with nuclear electricity would free it up for foreign trade. The new Five-Year Plan that Gorbachev's government had introduced at the 27th Party Congress in February 1986 had called for doubling nuclear-generated electricity, primarily by building reactors in the Ukraine. Those plans were now in doubt.

Next two chapters on Gorbachev (pp. 54-55):

Gorbachev's concerns for the next ten years [after 1970] were largely agricultural: drought, crop failures, dust storms, irrigation projects, road building. His work brought him into regular contact with Moscow and frequent conflict with Kulakov, who by then was the Politburo member responsible for agriculture. Gorbachev saw the economy stagnate, saw regional initiatives rejected, saw "manipulators" become "the heroes of the day," and found himself increasingly disenchanted: "Should you come up with your own ideas -- be prepared for trouble. You could even land in jail. It was actually impossible to do something sensible while complying with all the regulations and instructions. A popular adage hit the mark: 'All initiative is punishable.'"

(p. 56):

Remnick adds: "Gorbachev appears to have few illusions about his double face. Years after coming to power, he told [the journalist] Vitaly Korotich . . . 'In those days, we all licked Brezhnev's ass -- all of us!'" Ass-lickers are a staple of middle bureaucracies, of course, and are certainly not unique to the former Soviet Union. The activist and strategic analyst Daniel Ellsberg identifies the same pattern of behavior in American bureaucrats. The U.S. government, he points out, "does not require true believers to run it. . . . The system consciously runs by men who -- in order to stay in the game, to be close to the center of power, to have the hope that someday the moment may come when their own true values will be served -- will go on for years serving values that are the opposite of what they privately believe." Hence the frequent phenomenon of recantation from retirement.

(pp. 60-61):

Not only second-rank officials such as Baibakov and Gorbachev feared usurping Brezhnev's prerogatives where the military was concerned; so also did Gromyko and Andropov. One consequence of military influence over the Soviet leadership, ultimately devastating, was the 1979 decision to invade Afghanistan. Arbatov believes that "the military-industrial complex had grown to such proportions [by then] that it escaped political control." Brezhnev, Arbatov points out, had been the Central Committee's secretary of defense industries before he became the general secretary, and "treated the military as a very important power base." Ustinov, the minister of defense, "matched Brezhnev in his sycophancy toward the military." Brezhnev's failing health, exacerbated by an addiction to sleeping pills, added to the confusion.

Anatoly Chernyaev, an international analyst for the Central Committee who would become one of Gorbachev's most trusted advisers, points to Ustinov as the instigator of the December 1979 invasion:

I learned that the intervention in Afghanistan was initiated by Ustinov. The project to present this "idea" to Brezhnev was organized by a group of four: Ustinov and Gromyko, plus Andropov and [the Central Committee secretary for international affairs Boris] Ponomarev. Andropov was reserved but didn't object, only noting certain "possible complications." Ponomarev also expressed some doubts, but then quickly joined in.

Both Arbatov and Chernyaev note that the senior military staff objected to the war, "arguing," says Chernyaev, "that it would be impossible and senseless," but according to Arbatov, the Ministry of Defense nevertheless promoted and even insisted upon the intervention, which he calls "a pretty typical escalation of military aid." With the United States covertly supporting the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen, Afghanistan in the 1980s became the Soviet Union's Vietnam.

In other words, Afghanistan was the Soviet Union's Vietnam not just in terms of fruitless expense, division, and ultimate defeat; the Soviet Union entered into Afghanistan following the same bureaucratic logic that led the US ever deeper into Vietnam.

(pp. 61-62):

The excesses of the Soviet military-industrial complex in the 1970s were as much the consequence of internal policy as they were of external threat. The complex was "something like a bull in a china shop" according to a former Soviet defense official named Vitaliy Katayev -- " a sort of Soviet Texas." It "always demanded as much weaponry as possible." The decision to produce a new weapons system was usually made "not on the basis of military needs or technical merit . . . but rather on the basis of [the] authority of its sponsors" and their personal relationships with the political leadership. And sine the complex was expected to increase its output by at least 3 percent annually, "production of many types of weapons was not stopped even after the army was saturated with them." The purpose of this overproduction, a former Soviet military economist explains, was "to keep the production base 'warm'" -- to be ready to mobilize production in case war broke out. If mobilizing production -- that is, preparing to fight a long war -- looks like antiquated 1930s policy in a nuclear world, he adds, it was.

Massively overproducing arms, Arbatov concludes, "undermined Western trust toward us. Right-wingers and militarists in the United States and other NATO countries waged a successful campaign to create public mistrust of us. . . . More than that, our actions encouraged Americans to intensify the arms race."

"The Bomber Will Always Get Through" (p. 74-75):

That arms race began with the Anglo-American program itself -- the Manhattan Project -- because the United States and Britain had chosen not to share knowledge of the secret program (not of how to build atomic bombs -- no one proposed to do that -- but simply of the fact that the United States and Britain were developing them) with the Soviet Union even though it was an ally in the fight against Nazi Germany. Since the Soviets had recruited several high-level espionage agents within the Manhattan Project, they were fully aware that they were being excluded.

Stalin drew the logical conclusion that the Americans intended to use their unique weapon to intimidate him after the war. Once the evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki overcame his doubts about the authenticity of the bomb plans his spies had delivered, he made the full resources of the state available to the Soviet effort. By 1948, Soviet scientists under the charismatic physicist Igor Kurchatov had not only replicated the American plutonium implosion bomb ("Fat Man") but had also developed an improved design of half the weight and twice the yield. Lavrenty Beria, the brutal KGB chief whom Stalin had appointed to oversee the bomb program, was unwilling to risk the possible failure of an indigenous, untested design and ordered Kurchatov to copy the American design, which the atomic bombing of Nagasaki had proven would work. The Soviet copy, RDS-1 (Joe 1 in U.S. nomenclature), was tested on 29 August 1949 on a tower on the Kazak steppe lands at Semipalatinsk, yielding twenty-two kilotons, matching the yield of the Nagasaki bomb. A pilot series of five RDS-1 bombs inaugurated the Soviet nuclear arsenal in March 1950. Serial production of RDS-1s began in December 1951.

With its four-year lead, the United States was well ahead of the Soviet Union in nuclear-weapons development and production by the end of 1951. Until 1948, the United States had stockpiled slightly improved Fat Man bombs and a few uranium bombs that were ruggedized for attacks on hardened targets such as submarine pens and command bunkers. In its first series of weapons-design tests, Operation Sandstone, which was conducted in the Marshall Islands in 1948, it had proved the principle of core levitation -- suspending the nuclear core within its natural uranium tamper so that the tamper material had a gap across which to accelerate before imploding the core -- and tested both a composite plutonium-uranium core and cores of highly enriched uranium (HEU) alone. These and other evolutionary improvements resulted in yields of up to forty-nine kilotons, effectively increasing the total yield of the U.S. stockpile by 75 percent. In 1951, that stockpile held 438 weapons; by then the Soviet Union had manufactured twenty-five.

Before 1949, the United States had considered its nuclear monopoly to be roughly the equivalent of the superior numbers of Soviet forces occupying the eastern half of Europe, a finding that had allowed President Harry S. Truman to bring U.S. troops home while cutting the defense budget drastically from its wartime highs. From Washington's point of view, adding atomic bombs to Soviet ground-force superiority deprived the United States of a unique capability and tilted the balance decisively in the Soviet Union's favor.

The US responded to accelerating development of the hydrogen fusion bomb. The Soviet Union responded in kind. The arms race continued.

(p. 81):

Both sides took the point. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, stated it succinctly for the American side in an essay published in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1969:

In light of the certain prospect of retaliation, there has been literally no chance at all that any sane political authority, in either the United States or the Soviet Union, would consciously choose to start a nuclear war. This proposition is true for the past, the present and the foreseeable future. . . . In the real world of real political leaders . . . a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.

On the Soviet side, Nikita Kruschev recalled in retirement that his first nuclear-weapons briefing after he took power in 1953 had shaken him. "I couldn't sleep for several days," he said. "Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons, and when I realized that, I was able to sleep again." At least one member of the Soviet general staff, Vladimir Slipchenko, concurs. "The retaliatory strike of even one nuclear warhead," Slipchenko told a post-Cold War conference, "would cause unacceptable damage to a country."

(pp. 85-86):

By 1960, the U.S. arsenal had increased to 18,638 bombs and warheads yielding 20,500 megatons (1.4 million Hiroshimas), of which 3,127 were strategic weapons deployed on B-47 and B-52 bombers, large first-generation Atlas and Titan liquid-fueled ballistic missiles and Polaris nuclear submarines. American megatonnage peaked in 1960. In those years, SAC favored massive ten- to twenty-five-megaton behemoths to maximize its delivery capacity and destroy multiple DGZs simultaneously, but as ballastic missiles came into prominence, the total yield of the U.S. stockpile declined to reflect the missiles' more critical weight requirements and greater accuracy. ("The rule of thumb," write the weapons historians Robert S. Norris and William Arkin, "is that making a weapon twice as accurate allows an eightfold reduction in yield while achieving the same level of destruction.")

Most Soviet nuclear weapons were tactical, designed for crushing NATO in a conflict arose with Warsaw Pact forces in Europe; the total Soviet arsenal in 1960 of seventeen hundred bombs and warheads included only about 350 strategic weapons. The small Soviet bomber force had been supplemented by late 1960 with only four intercontinental ballastic missiles and a limited and primitive force of submarines carrying short-range missiles. The Soviet bombers were slow and vulnerable; the KGB kept missile warheads separate from the missiles, which required up to twenty-four hours to assemble, warm up, and fuel; and the submarines, which were normally kept in port, would have to cross the Atlantic or Pacific to within about two hundred miles of North America and surface to launch their missiles. "The Soviets had paltry forces," comments the former secretary of defense James Schlesinger -- "hardly enough to stage an attack on the United States."

SIOP is Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP-62 is the 1962 edition), basically the US contingency plan for launching an all-out attack on the Soviet Union (pp. 87-88):

Contemporary estimates of the consequences of an all-out SIOP attack put the death toll at 285 million Soviet and Chinese citizens and millions more dead in Eastern Europe -- more than twice the dead of all the wars of the twentieth century. The journalist Fred Kaplan reports that General David Shoup, the Marine Corps commandant, asked Thomas Power at a similar SIOP briefing in 1960 if the United States had any options to avoid bombing China if that country happened not to be involved in the conflict that led to nuclear war. "Well, yeah, we could do that," Kaplan reports Power replying, "but I hope nobody thinks of it because it would really screw up the plan." Back in Washington, Kaplan writes, other U.S. military leaders endorsed SIOP-62 to the secretary of defense. "David Shoup stood and said, 'Sir, any plan that kills millions of Chinese when it isn't even their war is not a good plan. This is not the American way."

As if such deliberate democide were not horrific enough, one SIOP reviewer after another discovered that its damage calculations were based only on the blast effects of nuclear weapons, when the primary mode of destruction of weapons with yields greater than one hundred kilotons -- most U.S. strategic weapons -- is fire. Admiral Harry Felt, the commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, cabled the Joint Chiefs in January 1961 after reviewing the SIOP, "only blast effects were considered. . . . other effects such as heat, fire and radiation should be used when drawing up damage criteria for the SIOP."

(p. 93):

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Podvig, the Soviet bomber fleet "could deliver aobut 270 nuclear weapons to U.S. territory." But fear of the SAC commander Thomas Power's bomber fleet, which he maintained on airborne alert throughout the week of the crisis, flying orbits over the Mediterranean and northern Canada, landing only long enough to change crews, led the Soviets to keep their bombers grounded; the Soviet Union was nearly as defenseless against nuclear attack that week as Japan had been at the end of the Second World War, although Soviet submarines in the Caribbean could have launched their missiles against U.S. targets in retaliation. American nuclear assets consisted of several thousand bombs on 1,576 SAC bombers, 183 Atlas and Titan ICBMs, 144 Polaris missiles on nine nuclear submarines, and the first squadron of ten Minutemen I missiles carrying W59 one-megaton warheads, brought to full alert for the first time at the height of the crisis on Friday, 26 October 1962.

(pp. 94-95):

That the United States could force the leaders of the Soviet Union to remove their missiles from Cuba frightened and deeply humiliated them. "The results were very painful and they were taken very painfully by our leadership," the Soviet lieutenant general Nikolai Detinov remembers. "Because of the strategic [imbalance] between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had to accept everything that the United States dictated to it and this had a painful effect on our country and our government." As a result, says Detinov, "all our economic resources were mobilized [afterward] to solve this problem." The Soviet diplomat who negotiated the crisis settlement, Vasily Kuznetsov, had implicitly threatened such a response. "Well, Mr. McCloy," he challenged his American counterpart, John J. McCloy, "we will honor this agreement. But I want to tell you something. You will never do this to us again."

"Humiliatian in Cuba," writes Robert Gates, "galvanized the Soviets into action. The USSR proceeded to undertake the largest military buildup in history over a twenty-five-year period, with profound consequences for the international balance of power, for the United States, and ultimately, and fatefully, for the Soviet economy and state." Detinov concurs:

During the 1960s, the Soviet government mobilized the economy to the point that all industrial facilities were turned to military production. All factories were included. . . . The rate of growth to our national economy went down in all branches. While before the Caribbean crisis we had a very steady rate of production, after the Caribbean crisis all production in other areas started going down thanks to the fact that all factories were mobilized in the name of military technology. Turning the national economy around later on was very hard.

Work on what Podvig calls "a simple and relatively inexpensive missile that could be used to increase the number of missiles in the Soviet ICBM force and provide quantitative parity with that of the United States" was authorized in March 1963, just five months after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis; the light SS-11 would carry a 1.1-megaton warhead to compensate for its inaccuracy. The following September, the Soviets tested a heavier missile already in development, the SS-9, with a 10-megaton warhead. SS-11 flight tests began in 1965, and by 1966 both missiles were being deployed. Soviet Yankee-class nuclear-missile submarines, each carrying sixteen missiles with 1-megaton warheads, began patrolling the coasts of the United States in 1967.

One casualty of the Soviet buildup of missile forces was the nation's program to put men on the moon. Soviet dreams of beating the United States to the moon "were quietly abandoned" in the late 1960s, writes the former Air Force secretary Thomas Reed, "in favor of a massive ICBM buildup."

(pp. 104-106):

The "degree of reality" that Nitze sacrificed to this portrait of implacable evil was considerable. Just five years earlier, the Soviet Union had emerged from a brutal war to count its losses: at least twenty-five million people killed, one-tenth of its population; millions more invalided and twenty-five million made homeless; half its industry destroyed; coal production as of 1945 down 33 percent compared to 1941, oil production down 46 percent, steel 48 percent, meat 40 percent, dairy 55 percent, electricity 33 percent. Yet NSC-68 was asserting that the war-battered nation had recovered sufficiently five years later to muster the energy and resources for an implacable campaign to destroy the United States and rule the world.

The most egregious exaggeration of NSC-68 was its assessment of the Soviet Union's 1950 war-fighting capability. It was certainly true that Stalin had added two million more men to the three million kept under arms facing the West at the end of the war -- his counterpoise to the American nuclear monopoly -- and then had tested an atomic bomb as well. Nitze, however, citing the Joint Chiefs as his authority, claimed that if a major war should occur that year, 1950, the Soviet Union would be capable not only of immediately overrunning Western Europe, but also of "driv[ing] toward the oil-bearing areas of the Near and Middle East," consolidating "Communist gains" in the Far East, launching air attacks against Britain and air and sea attacks against the shipping lanes of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and attacking "selected targets with atomic weapons, now including the likelihood of such attacks against targets in Alaska, Canada and the United States." (With only five atomic bombs in its arsenal that year, the Soviets would have had to be selective indeed in choosing targets.) [ . . . ]

Nitze underplayed the American deterrent because he wanted his country not simply to deter a theoretical Soviet attack but also "to check and to roll back the Kremlin's drive for world domination." He, Acheson, and the military services thus called for "a rapid build-up of political, economic and military strength in the free world."

Truman, on the other hand, concerned about the federal budget, was skeptical of NSC-68 at first. Following the outbreak of the Korean War, which the president believed to be a Soviet feint into South Asia in preparation for war in Europe, he endorsed it. He had imposed a limit of $14.4 billion on the 1949 defense budget, and beginning in 1950 it was supposed to be cut further to $13 billion. After Truman endorsed NSC-68, he allowed the defense budget to increase almost fourfold; defense outlays in 1953 totaled more than $52 billion.

Even more significantly, NSC-68 began the historic uncoupling of the U.S. defense budget from fiscal policy. Truman and his predecessors had first determined a total budget number, based on available resources, and had then allotted part of that total to defense. Such prudence now became politically dangerous. Most administrations after Truman's determined the defense requirements first and then either allocated what was left to domestic needs or added to the deficit (or, more rarely, raised taxes) to sustain both guns and butter. Determining defense requirements first was the way it worked in the Soviet Union as well, with the significant difference that the far larger U.S. economy cushioned the impact of increasing diversions of federal income to the military.

(pp. 116-117):

Ironically, the anti-détente campaign was launched just as détente was succeeding, and serving as political cover for a U.S. military buildup as well. Nixon and Kissinger, Robert Gates points out, used it "to defend a number of strategic-weapons programs from the budget knife on the Hill -- from ABM to Trident [missile submarines], cruise missiles, and the B-1 bomber." The new generation of weapons systems that Jimmy Carter stalled in 1976 and then restarted in 1979 and that Ronald Reagan greatly expanded in the 1980s "amid applause from conservatives," says Gates, "could not have been started or sustained politically in the Nixon years without détente. During the 1970s, on defense programs, the conservatives were never able to put congressional votes where their mouths were." Meanwhile, the growth in Soviet military spending, Cahn adds, "declined sharply" in 1975, "from 4-5 to 2 percent, and procurement of weapons was flat."

The conservatives responsible for this burgeoning exercise in threat inflation, many of them Democrats allied with Scoop Jackson, fought détente through the inglorious conclusion of the Nixon administration -- the humiliated president resigned his office and flying home to California in August 1974, and a new president, Gerald Ford, taking the reins. These conservatives discerned a nation in decline, reeling from a war lost in Vietnam, dangerously misled by détente -- and themselves ignored and out of power. "Soviet policy never changes," the former undersecretary of state Eugene Rostow, one of the most outspoken, scolded Henry Kissinger at the time. Kissinger responded sharply that "a balance of mutual interest" was a better guide to policy than "ideological dogma." But "the Democratic Party didn't want to hear us," Rostow complained, "and we weren't getting any general publicity" because Americans were sick of domino theories and war-derived domestic conflict.

(p. 119):

"Rumsfeld and Cheney were the right wing of the Ford administration," writes the journalist Sidney Blumenthal, "opposed to the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and they operated by stealthy internal maneuver." Once Rumsfeld became secretary of defense, he attempted to sabotage Kissinger's SALT II negotiations. An important reason for Colby's replacement with the more pliable George H. W. Bush, Blumenthal, says, was the CIA's unwillingness to cooperate with the Rumsfeld-Cheney effort. "Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view, the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas."

(p. 124):

The Soviest had demonstrated by their caution and their desperate race to catch up with a technologically and economically superior adversary that they would follow our lead wherever we led them, evidently believing we knew where we were going. They had even sacrificed their cherished goal of putting men on the moon to turn their science and industry to missile building in the years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The "scientific" view that Pipes despised, based as it was on the fundamental physical reality that nuclear weapons were devastating instruments of terror and mass fire, so destructive that one or two per city would deliver chaos and suffering enough to terminate any war, needed no one's insight or approval. Pipes told the American physicist and government adviser Richard Garwin that his argument was based on "his deep knowledge of the Russian soul." But nuclear reality was never a matter of opinion, however soulful. It was a matter of fact, as political leaders facing the brink seem repeatedly to have understood.

CPD was the Committee on the Present Danger, a name borrowed from a group led by James Bryant Conant during the Korean War; the new group grew out of the 1976 Team B group headed by Richard Pipes, which argued for expanding the US nuclear arsenal; CPD members included: Walt Rostow, Paul Nitze, David Packard, Lane Kirkland, Dean Rusk, Elmo Zumwalt Jr., William Casey, William Colby, Clare Boothe Luce, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Richard Scaife, Edward Teller, and Ronald Reagan; some 33 members joined the Reagan administration (pp. 133-134):

When eight CPD members met with Carter at the White House in 1977, Rostow recalled, "we were stunned, just stunned. The notion that that fellow was president was just frightening."

What frightened the CPD was Carter's initial program, as he described it later, "to try to put forward to the Soviet Union a much more dramatic reduction in the total quantity and effectiveness of the nuclear weapons in our arsenals, and to bring about a comprehensive test ban to eliminate the epxlosion of any nuclear devices, either underground or in the air." By March, Carter had dispatched his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, to Moscow "with what I thought was a very good proposal for dramatic cuts [in the two sides' nuclear arsenals]," Carter said. At that point the CPD declared all-out war, opposing Carter and his "frightening" notions of nuclear sufficiency with a full arsenal of op-eds, talk-show appearances, position papers, and congressional testimony. CPD resistance was all the more odd since the proposal had been drafted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's anti-Soviet national security adviser, with substantial input from Richard Perle, and was designed to be unacceptable to the Soviet Union.

(pp. 149-150):

Reagan ended up spending almost as much on defense in the first five years of his presidency as had Ford, Nixon, and Carter combined, more than the cost of both the Korean and Vietnam wars -- the largest peacetime buildup in American history. One purpose of the Reagan defense buildup, of course, was to starve the beast of government domestic spending, part of the conservative Republican agenda. As the political scientist Daniel Wirls notes, "for fiscal 1982, Reagan negotiated with Congress for about $35 billion in cuts in hundreds of domestic programs. . . . In budgetary terms, this change is . . . striking: from [fiscal year] 1981 to 1987 discretionary spending on domestic programs decreased by 21 percent in real terms while defense outlays increased by 45 percent." Reagan himself, however, was primarily interested in the United States' relationship with the Soviet Union -- the CPD's bogus "window of vulnerability." His administration's "extraordinary surge in defense spending," Wirls writes, "was devoted to the modernization and expansion of the gamut of military programs, conventional and nuclear, but first and foremost to the nuclear weapons rearmament program."

"In all of their writings on foreign policy," the journalist Frances Fitzgerald writes, assessing what she calls the "warrior intellectuals" of the CPD and the Reagan administration, "they offer not one single constructive suggestion as to what the United States might do to, say, prevent widespread famine, stop the crazy lurches of the economic system, prevent ecological disaster or simply keep the peace and lessen the risk of nuclear war. The solution they have to all problems is confrontation and the threat, or use, of military force. Nowhere do they attempt to count the cost of keeping the Third World down by force, and nowhere do they consider in any serious fashion what risks this policy may pose to the physical security of the United States."

(p. 157):

Reagan, not yet aware of the developing Soviet war scare, ratcheted his rhetoric higher in a March 1983 speech to the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. There he named the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world" and, famously, "an evil empire." The speech, built in part from paragraphs cut by more cautious advisers from his speech at Westminster, was meant to win the support of fundamentalist Christians against the Nuclear Freeze movement.

The "war scare" alluded to was the Soviet reaction to a particularly aggressive set of war game exercises the US was conducting in a period of massive US military buildup as well as Regan's rhetoric (p. 167):

Reagan was surprised and shocked that the Soviets had taken his years of militant rhetoric and his massive arms buildup seriously. He belittled their concerns in his diary on 14 November: "I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them, we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What have they got that anyone would want?" A few weeks later Wiliam Casey returned from meeting with British intelligence in London and briefed Reagan further on RYAN and ABLE ARCHER 83. "Do you suppose they really believe that?" the president of the United States asked McFarlane less defensively afterward, the truth finally dawning. "I don't see how they could believe that -- but it's something to think about."

(pp. 170-173):

How Reagan's mind worked was a subject of considerable discussion during the years of his presidency and among his biographers afterward. Most discussants came to similar conclusions, although their estimates of the quality of Reagan's thinking depended on whether they were promoters or detractors of his goals. In a word, Reagan thought "anecdotally, not analytically," as the journalist and former assistant secretary of state Leslie Gelb put it. The president organized events and ideas on a Procrustean bed of personal experiences and rigid beliefs. Taxes stifled enterprise because in the 1950s a top federal income tax rate of 91 percent on earned income had led him and other movie stars to limit their acting work to four films a year. Communists were cynical, brutal, cold-blooded, and completely lacking in morality because the Communists he believed he had fought for control of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president had seemed to him to be such people. "Firsthand discoveries are the ones that matter to Reagan," Cannon confirms. "When he expressed his view of Communist morality at his first presidential news conference, he believed he was talking from experience."

Cannon found that "most of his aides thought of him as intelligent, but many also considered him intellectually lazy." In fact, they laughed at him behind his back. He was Joe Six-pack, they told each other, his opinions and judgments exactly those guileless truisms you would expect to find among patrons of a neighborhood bar. "The sad, shared secret of the Reagan White House," Cannon writes, "was that no one in the presidential entourage had confidence in the judgment or capacities of the president. Often, they took advantage of Reagan's niceness and naïveté to indulge competing concepts of the presidency and advance their own ambitions. Pragmatists and conservatives alike treated Reagan as if he were a child monarch in need of constant protection. They paid homage to him, but gave him no respect." A book in his hand was more likely to be a Tom Clancy novel than a Henry Kissinger memoir -- though the same could be said for many Americans. "Not one of the friends and aides" Leslie Gelb interviewed "suggested that the President was, in any conventional sense, analytical, intellectually curious or well-informed -- even though it would have been easy and natural for them to say so. They clearly did not think it necessary. Time and again, they painted a picture of a man who had serious intellectual shortcomings but was a political heavyweight, a leader whose instincts and intuition were right more often than their own analyses. His mind, they said, is shaped almost entirely by his own personal history, not by pondering on history books." For George Schultz, in Cannon's paraphrase, "Reagan's seemingly irrelevant anecdotes were tools that the president used to comprehend the world. 'He often reduced his thinking to a joke,' Shultz said. 'That doesn't mean it didn't have a heavy element to it.'" Cannon counters that Reagan "sometimes used humor to avoid facing issues he ought to have faced, particularly the reality that it was impossible to increase military spending, reduce taxes and balance the budget simultaneously." Reagan's difficulty with governing went deeper, Cannon insists:

His biggest problem was that he didn't know enough about public policy to participate fully in his presidency -- and often didn't realize how much he didn't know. Reagan's legal advisers learned that he knew little about the law, his national security advisers found that he was devoid of knowledge on the capabilities of most U.S. and Soviet weapons systems and his economists discovered that he was poorly informed on economics, even though he sometimes reminded them that he had majored in economics and sociology at Eureka College.

("Playing it safe," the cultural historian Garry Wills writes, explaining Reagan's economic lacunae, "he majored in economics -- [economics professor] Archibald Gray was the most notoriously easy grader on the campus.")

Less politely, the political scientist Richard M. Pious, reviewing Cannon's biography and other studies of the president, reduced their findings to three parallel axioms: "Reagan could only understand things if they were presented as a story; he could only explain something if he narrated it; he could only think about principles if they involved metaphor and analogy." For Sidney Blumenthal, who contrasts Reagan's triumphant promotion of political conservatism with Barry Goldwater's failure, the president's storytelling was the secret of his success:

With him, facts don't determine the case; they don't make his beliefs true. Rather, his beliefs give life to the facts, which are tailored to have a moral. Reagan doesn't use stories the way experts use statistics. They seek mathematical certainty, whereas he has moral certainty. He asks listeners to trust the tale, not necessarily the detail. If the facts belie his premises, then the facts are at fault, and he can shift ground without making any fundamental change in his beliefs. His policies might be contradictory and counterproductive, but his mythology remains appealing. . . . His life experience vindicates his nostalgic approach to the future; he feels what he says, and that gives it authenticity and force.

Such a mode of thought, far from being baffling or unique, is characteristic of religious, and particularly of fundamentalist, thinking, an archaic mode in which facts are allegorized into parables or reinterpreted to match doctrine. If the Bible says the world was created in seven days and humankind is a separate creation, then evolution must be an unsupportable theory and fossils simply traps God has set to confound unbelievers. If homosexuality is proscribed in Genesis and Leviticus, then it must be a lifestyle choice, not a biologically determined orientation. If religious belief is necessary to morality, then Communist -- atheists by definition -- must be amoral.

Reagan's fundamentalist mentation encouraged him to find the supernatural as credible as the natural. He had been convinced since at least his days as governor of California that the end of the world was approaching. He believed that the Bible predicted the future. "Everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ," he told a surprised California state senator one day in 1971, citing as a sign his understanding that Libya had gone Communist. The founding of Israel in 1948, the Jews thus reclaiming their homeland, was another sign Reagan credited as meaning that a great final battle between good and evil would soon be fought on the plain of Armageddon. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he believed, fulfilled the prediction in Revelation of an army out of Asia of "twice ten thousand times ten thousand" routed by plagues of "fire and smoke and sulfur." He added Chernobyl to his list when he learned that the name of the old town was the Byelorussian word for wormwood, fulfilling the prophecy of "a great star [that] fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. The name of the star is Wormwood."

(p. 173):

Robert McFarlane concluded that Reagan's commitment to strategic defense derived primarily from his belief that Armageddon was approaching. "From the time he adopted the Armageddon thesis," the national security adviser told Cannon, "he saw it as a nuclear catastrophe. Well, what do you do about that? Reagan's answer was that you build a tent or a bubble and protect your country. This was one of the intellectual contradictions in Reagan's thinking. He sees himself as a romantic, heroic figure who believes in the power of a hero to overcome even Armageddon. I think it may come from Hollywood. Wherever it came from, he believes that the power of a person and an idea could change the outcome of something even as terrible as Armageddon. This was the greatest challenge of all. . . . He didn't see himself as God, but he saw himself as a heroic figure on earth." Frank Carlucci, deputy secretary of defense under Caspar Weinberger and subsequently one of Reagan's five national security advisers, confirmed that Reagan connected Armageddon with nuclear war. "He would say to me that nuclear weapons are inherently evil," Carlucci told Cannon. When Carlucci argued the case for nuclear deterrence, Cannon paraphrases, "he did not convince Reagan, who responded to the argument by telling Carlucci about Armageddon."

Continued in extended body . . .