Matthew R Simmons: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (2005; paperback, 2005, Wiley)

Simmons is chairman of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based investment bank specializing in the energy industry. He made a big splash with this book, which questions whether claims are true that Saudi Aramco can significantly expand their petroleum production to keep up with projected demand. His background is in business (MBA), not geology, but the book is remarkably detailed in terms of Saudi Arabia's oilfield geology and technology. I figured at first I'd just read the early history sections and skip the fine print, but the latter proved irresistible. Info toward the back of the book on non-Saudi oilfields is also very interesting.

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As'ad Abukhalil: The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power (paperback, 2004, Seven Stories)

After reading Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, I wanted some more background history on Saudi Arabia. I picked up this short book, which helped a bit. The problem is not so much that it is intransigently anti-Saudi -- as one correspondent warned me -- as that it raises more questions than it answers. For one thing, the Saudis have gotten very little real value, especially in terms of their own independence and self-sufficiency, out of the huge amount of oil they have shipped to the developed world. As one of the charts here shows, the Saudis from 1987-97 (which were not especially good years for the oil business) spent an average of $10 billion/year on US arms, an investment for . . . what? The money they've spent on supporting anti-communist militias abroad (e.g., Afghanistan) has been a loss. Their religious propaganda has gotten them little if anything. Their private investments in the US and Europe seem to have confused their allegiances. Ever since the founding of OPEC there have been good reasons to nudge oil prices up, both to conserve diminishing supplies and to scratch out a little redistribution of the west's wealth, but the Saudis more often than not have undermined OPEC.

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Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007, Libri)

I read a lot of feminist writings in the 1970s, and was often struck by how they opened up novel and (for me) surprising views on subjects that I didn't expect to learn much new or surprising on. I haven't read many feminist writings since then, probably because the insights seemed to grow stale and formulaic. One exception was Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. This is another. It's actually two books: one reviews a long list of "captivity narratives" -- memoirs, accounts, and mythicized novels of white American women kidnapped by Indians, whose presence and alienness was at least as terrifying for early Americans as anything the islamofascists might fantasize; the other is an account of what happened after 9/11, focusing on the reflexive return of sexual role-playing, a world of trembling "security moms" and studly politicians offering themselves as protective heroes. Not that it's exactly lived up to the myth.

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Karen Armstrong: Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (1988; 1991; second edition, paperback, 2001, Anchor Books)

Karen Armstrong has become my first-call resource for the history of religion. I first saw her interviewed by Bill Moyers, then picked up her The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which seemed like something one should learn a little about these days, even if you basically consider them all a bunch of nut cases. I was pleased enough that I sought out her earlier book, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wanting to pick up a little historical background on the Crusades, I figured this book would be a good place to start. It is and isn't. The sections on medieavel history are spotty, although they do help, but at least half the book is devoted to more current concerns, especially the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even this isn't all that up to date: the book was originally published in 1988, with a post-9/11 preface rushed out for a timely December 2001 reprint. Going back through the quotes, I wish I had marked more old history and less new, but everything below is interesting in its own right. Just doesn't give the proper feel for the book, which despite its jumbledness is pretty dependably on target -- at least for our present interests in this history. It's certainly not the only possible approach to historical context of the Crusades.

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Sven Lindqvist: "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey Into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1992; paperback, 1996, The New Press)

I noticed this book on Tom Engelhardt's Tom's Review of Books, where it stood out for one thing as one of the few relatively non-new books. It's oddly structured as a travel narrative, where the author is trekking across the Sahara from Algeria down. The trip itself has relatively little to do with Conrad's The Heart of Darkness -- the source of the title -- and the murderous ideologies of the era surrounding it. The notion that the "lesser races" were dying out (as opposed to being killed off) is something that wouldn't occur to us today, given our own experience of the population explosion in Africa, Latin America, etc. That it was dilligently wrapped up with the aura of science was typical of the era, something we should be more conscious of than most people are today.

The story of King Leopold and the Congo has recently been told by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold's Ghost. I read that a few years back; haven't collected notes from it, and should have. The story of the Herero genocide is less well known, but familiar to me from its prominent role in Thomas Pynchon's novel V.

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Charles C Mann: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2006; paperback, 2007, Vintage Books)

This book attempts to sum up the vast range of recent research into the America prior to the European discovery by Columbus in 1492. As such, it jumps around a lot and is rather scattered. The quotes I picked out are even more scattered -- disease and the ease of conquest is one particular theme. Not all of the research is equally new or newsworthy. Some remains very uncertain. We still know much more about the moment of impact than whatever came before, and what we know about the moment of impact has frequently been misunderstood not least because the impact itself profoundly disturbed our findings.

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Continuing with the books this week. Looking through the last couple of weeks, I've noticed that these book things take a lot of scrolling to get through. The blog software has a limit on how long an article lead can be, and I topped that on Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly. The way around that is to split the piece in half, putting the extra into the "extended body" -- don't know if there's a limit there, too. But it occurs to me that from here on out it might be best to just put the top section into the blog entry and drop the quotes section into the extended body. Means you'll have to do an extra click to get there, but it'll be easier to get around when you're just scanning.

The books pieces are all kept in the Books section, although they're not guaranteed to be up to date when I make the initial post. I generally update the whole website once a week, usually on Monday, so that's when we all get back in sync.

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Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008, Simon & Schuster)

Baker's book is written as a chronological compendium of short news bits, as informal as a tabloid newspaper. The story begins before 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany -- the nominal starting date of WWII. It begins before 1933, when Hitler seized power in Germany. The early parts could have been documented more fully, but they give us a taste of the nations and persons squaring away for the big war. The story goes on through the end of 1941, by which time Germany has invaded the Soviet Union, and Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor and overrun the American colonial territory in the Philippines. It's also a date by which Germany had started implementing its "final solution" and the US had launched its Manhattan Project, another concept of final solution. It's worth pointing out that Churchill always saw massive bombing as the way to beat his enemies, but believed that bombing would only increase the resolve of the English to fight on. It's worth noting that while Roosevelt waited for the US to be attacked before entering WWII, he planned assiduously for that day, and for several years pushed policies to provoke Japan into attacking the US. It's also worth noting that whereas today we see the Holocaust as a convincing reason for the US and the UK to have gone to war against Germany, at the time neither Churchill nor Roosevelt would show Jewish suffering the slightest recognition or credence: in public and in private they entered the war for other reasons. It's also worth noting that the only people who did try to help Jews escape from impending doom were the pacifists, who in the end were too few and too late.

The following quotes offer a taste of this remarkable book.

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Stephen Holmes: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (2007, Cambridge University Press)

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Chalmers Johnson wrote a review of Holmes' book for TomDispatch. Holmes provides a guide to 12 books that provide a prism into how the US reacted to the 9/11 attacks. The following is a list of books Holmes covers. The descriptions are edited down from Johnson's review (moving sentences around, cutting surplus, fixing punctuation; the quotes in these paragraphs are from Holmes' book):

• Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003, Knopf): Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence? While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus," Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on the use of force in international politics. "Far from guaranteeing an unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States, with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the Middle East" (p. 72).

• Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006, Pantheon): How was the war lost? Holmes regards this book as the best treatment of the military aspects of the disaster, down to and including U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military.

• James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004, Viking): How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmares? One of Mann's more original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hard-liners into toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to replace.  . . . We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power" (p. 106).

• Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (2003, Verso): What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration? He argues that perhaps Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in Washington, D.C., allotted disproportionate influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror, they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they happened to preside" (p. 107)."

• Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996, Simon and Schuster): Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War? Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for homogeneity" (p. 136). [Johnson wonders why include this relatively old book. I suspect it because the neocon obsession with the Middle East dates back further, with Huntington and Bernard Lewis providing intellectual cover for the notion that Arabs are insurmountably alien.]

• Samantha Power, "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002, Basic): What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror? As Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in U.S. foreign policy thinking after the end of the Cold War. . . . Their influence was small, however, and after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the Constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch -- they were, after all, doing what they had always wanted to do -- but Holmes' argument that "a savvy prowar party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p. 157) is worth considering.

• Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists (2005, Soft Skull Press): How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of a wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous extremism" (p. 181). Berman, Holmes points out, conflated anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason for including Berman is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists in their support of the war on terrorism.

• Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006, Yale University Press): How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become America's mission in the world? Holmes is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore, because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon "democratization" project for the Middle East. The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic transitions.

• Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004, WW Norton): Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting public protest. Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

• John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (2001, Princeton University Press): How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State? This book is Holmes' oddest choice -- a dated history from an establishmentarian point of view of the international institutions created by the United States after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialists in international relations, applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building missions.

• John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (2005, University of Chicago Press): Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-Constitutional authority in the hands of the president? In this final section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George Bush's and Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of the President's war-making power. Holmes wonders, "Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn" (p. 291). His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure -- that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay and ignore" (p. 301).

Fred Kaplan: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008, Wiley)

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(pp. 1-2):

Nearly all of America's blunders in war and peace these past few years stem from a single grand misconception: that the world changed after September 11, when in fact it didn't.

Certainly things about the world changed, not least Americans' sudden awareness that they were vulnerable. But the way the world works -- the nature of power, warfare, and politics among nations -- remained essentially the same.

A real change, a seismic shift in global politics, had taken place a decade earlier, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Yet America's political leaders at the start of the twenty-first century misunderstood this shift -- and in a way that their misreading of 9/11 would exacerbate.

George W. Bush and his top aides in the White House and the Pentagon came to office believing that the United States had emerged from its Cold War victory as the world's "sole superpower" and that they could therefore do pretty much as they pleased: issue orders and expect obeisance, topple rogue regimes at will, honor alliances and treaties when they were useful, and disregard them when they weren't.

But in fact, the end of the Cold War made America weaker, less capable of exerting its will on others. And its leaders' failure to recognize this, their inclination to devise policies based on the premise of omnipotence, made America weaker still.

The Mirage of Instant Victory (pp. 7-8):

Near the start of his [2000] presidential campaign, Bush had given a speech at The Citadel -- the historic military college in Charleston, South Carolina -- spelling out his top priorities for a new defense policy. He would deploy antiballastic missiles "at the earliest possible date," even if doing so meant withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, the long-standing centerpiece of Russian-American arms control accords. And he would transform the United States military. A "revolution in the technology of war" was in the works, he declared. Battles of the future would be won not by an army's "mass or size," but by its "mobility and swiftness," and vital new roles would be played by information networks and by highly accurate missiles and bombs.

If taken seriously, this was a truly dramatic pronouncement. It would mean a new concept of nuclear deterrence, an overhaul of the Army, a new look for war and peace.

As president, Bush said, he would order his secretary of defense to conduct "an immediate, comprehensive review of our military -- the structure of its forces, the state of its strategy, the priorities of its procurement." The secretary would have "a broad mandate -- to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come." Now that he was president, he told Rumsfeld to carry out that comprehensive review.

(p. 40):

[Rumsfeld's] disdain toward the Army was reinforced by his frequent dealings with Tommy Franks, the general he had come to know best. Franks, by no means a strategist, was widely regarded as a dim bulb, even by fellow officers. Rumsfeld, by nature impatient with people who weren't smart, despised Franks and wanted to get rid of him after the Afghanistan war. But over the Christmas holidays, Bush invited Franks out to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Franks was a tall, salty, plain-speaking, profane Texan -- he had gone to the same high school as Bush's wife, Laura -- and he and the president got along like gangbusters. Bush called Rumsfeld and said, "Tommy Franks is a hell of a guy!" Rumsfeld realized that Franks would have to stay.

(p. 49):

The invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. In the battlefield phase, it went, to a remarkable degree, as planned. The second part of the war -- after Saddam fled and his regime crumbled -- went disastrously, in part because it had not been planned at all.

Rumsfeld was so enamored of transformation -- as a theory of war, as a tool for control, and as an explanation for what still seemed the triumph in Afghanistan -- that he forgot, if he ever fully understood, that winning wars means more than hitting targets or winning battles. Rumsfeld didn't plan for Phase IV -- securing and stabilizing the country after the capital had fallen -- because he didn't think it would be necessary. [ . . . ]

Rumsfeld was not alone in his failure to think about the post-battle phase. As Wass de Czege noted in his memo on the war games, senior military leaders weren't thinking about it, either. There were no U.S. Army field manuals still in print on the subject of how to end a war.

Chapter "The Fog of Moral Clarity" -- deals with North Korea (pp. 54-55):

The first President bush launched a policy of "comprehensive engagement" with North Korea -- an all-fronts diplomatic campaign to keep Kim Il Sung from completing the facility or, short of that, from reprocessing the fuel rods. The campaign had little effect until September 27, 1991, when Bush announced that he was unilaterally dismantling all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons worldwide. He made this announcement in the context of rapidly warming relations between the United States and the Soviet Union amid the winding-down of the Cold War. But the move would also eliminate the hundreds of tactical nukes -- most of them on short-range missiles -- that America had deployed in South Korea decades ago to deter a North Korean invasion.

This tangible gesture unleashed a torrent of diplomatic activity. At the end of the year, after American officials confirmed that they had removed all nuclear weapons from the region, the leaders of North and South Korea -- who had never signed a peace treaty to end the war of 1950-1953 -- negotiated a mutual nonaggression pact. And North Korea, which had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty back in 1985, signed the NPT's "safeguards" agreement, allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to station inspectors and cameras inside its reactors and to place the nuclear fuel rods under lock and key.

By the time Clinton was elected president, relations were breaking down. North Korea refused to let the IAEA's inspectors inside a building that stored nuclear waste. The South Korean government arrested a ring of North Korean spies. The annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises, known as "Team Spirit," which Bush had suspended at the start of 1992, were scheduled to resume.

In March 1993, just over a month after Clinton took office, a Pyongyang spokesman denounced Team Spirit as a "nuclear war game preliminary to the invasion of North Korea." Kim Il Sung put the country on alert, ordering a dusk-to-dawn blackout and holding a massive rally -- over one hundred thousand attended -- in the capital.

This goes on for several more pages with details of ups and downs in suspicions, threats and negotiations; Kim Jong Il replaces Kim Il Sung; George W. Bush replaces Clinton; Kim Dae Jong is elected head of South Korea, favoring a more conciliatory policy toward the North (p. 61):

When Kim Dae Jong arrived in Washington, Bush publicly criticized him and his sunshine policy. Bush and his advisers, especially Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, decided not only to isolate North Korea, in the hopes -- in their minds, the near-certainty -- that the regime would crumble, but also to ignore South Korea, in hopes that its next election would restore a conservative to office.

Bush turned out to be the naïf. Kim Jong Il survived U.S. pressure. And Kim Dae Jung was soon replaced by Roh Moo Hyun, a populist who ran on a campaign that was not only pro-sunshine but anti-American.

(p. 70):

As the talks got under way, Jack Pritchard -- one of the few administration officials who had ever talked with North Korean diplomats -- resigned in protest. His job title was envoy for North Korean negotiations, yet he was prohibited from conducting negotiations. He asked himself, "What am I doing in government?" Pritchard had heard, from reliable quarters, that White House and Pentagon higher-ups referred to him as "the Clinton guy" and didn't want him involved in the six-party talks, lest he take them too seriously. Powell asked him not to quit, or at least not to do so publicly. Pritchard respectfully declined on both counts. He helped set up the six-party talks, left when they started, and went to work at the Brookings Institution. He explained his reasons for quitting to anyone who asked.

(p. 74):

The Bush administration's whole approach to North Korea hinged on a premise that turned out to be untrue -- that the United States had the power to set the terms of a new world order and, therefore, didn't need to compromise with competing concepts or interests.

The failure of American policy toward North Korea stemmed from a failure to grasp the implications of this new balance of power in Asia. It also stemmed from a failure to understand -- a willful refusal even to try to understand -- Kim Jong Il's motives in this standoff, the patterns of behavior he displayed, and the strategic options for dealing with them. Kim's eccentricities had little to do with it. Had he been the sanest leader on the planet, he would have had a rational motive to develop a nuclear arsenal. His diplomats had studied the two Gulf Wars carefully, and concluded that Saddam Hussein's big mistake lay in not having nuclear weapons to deter U.S. intervention. They made precisely this point in an official statement released back in April 2003, just after American tanks rolled into Baghdad: "The Iraq war teaches us a lesson that, in order to prevent a war, and defend a country's security and a nation's sovereignty, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent."

Chapter "Chasing Silver Bullets" -- on missile defense (p. 79):

The debate over missile defenses dated not to Reagan's Star Wars or even to the 1972 ABM Treaty but much further back, to the mid-to-late 1950s, when weapons scientists inside the government, carrying high-level security clearances, first discovered the technical obstacles. Roughly every ten years sine, the debate has repeated itself, with the same arguments, often among the same people. And each repetition has followed the same pattern, with the president and his aides at first enthusiastic about some technological advance that makes shooting down missiles seem suddenly feasible -- then realizing that the same old technical obstacles remain.

If Bush and his aides had known this history -- if they had known that the main critique of missile defenses was not political or philosophical but rather technical -- they might have stepped more gingerly before tripling the missile-defense budget yet again, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, and rushing a brand-new missile-defense system into production and deployment without having any idea whether it could really defend against an attack. But they didn't know the history; they thought that history was irrelevant anyway; and so they plunged ahead.

(p. 85):

It has been a recurring pattern throughout the history of arms procurement: when one rationale for buying a weapon proves untenable, its most impassioned advocates shift to a different rationale. The advocates know that the weapon is vital to the national defense; they figure that opposition stems from some ulterior motive (political hostility or pacifism or a rivalry with the branch of the armed services that's funding the weapon). For many, it would be too drastic a cognitive shift to reassess the wisdom of a project; better to devise a new argument that justifies it. [ . . . ]

This pattern of shifting rationales has been particularly acute in the history of the ABM, because the desire for a nuclear defense is understandably strong -- and because the case for specific ABM systems has fallen apart so repeatedly.

This is followed by various examples from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including this setback (pp. 88-89):

But a bigger shock came in the spring. On April 9, 1970, Kissinger's assistant on strategic issues, Laurence Lynn, met in DuBridge's White House office with two senior executives from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Safeguard's prime contractor. The executives had called the meeting to announce that they wanted out of the ABM business. They recited all the ways that Safeguard could be overwhelmed by the offense, and concluded -- as Lynn put it afterwards in a secret/eyes-only memo to Kissinger -- that Bell no longer wnted "to be associated with a program which cannot technically perform the missions the government claims it will perform."

Nixon and Kissinger were shocked. Nixon wrote in the margins of the memo, "My guess is that the real reasons are their scientists" -- who might have been influenced by all the Nobel laureates opposing the system -- "and P.R. fears." Whatever the motive, they knew this was a disaster. Once Congress found out that the prime contractor was giving up lucrative business on the grounds that Safeguard wouldn't work, the program was doomed.

Nixon finally negotiated the ABM treaty as a way to cover up the contractor's unwillingness to build the unworkable system. Reagan didn't understand that at all when he came up with his own Star Wars program.

(p. 106):

On September 11, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, was scheduled to give a speech on, as she put it, "the threats the problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday." The main topic was to be missile defense; her prepared text which was later leaked to the press, said nothing about terrorism. She never delivered the speech because that morning, terrorists flew two passenger jetliners into the World Trade Center and another one into the Pentagon.

The attack suggested that ballistic missiles might not be the most likely threat facing America; that even if missile defenses could be made to work, a foe could simply strike with other, far cheaper and easier weapons. But it only galvanized Bush and Rumsfeld to push full speed ahead.

(p. 112):

Spending on missile defense continued soaring, to $10 billion a year and beyond, an amount much larger than the budget for any other single weapons program. It remained a great boon for contractors. And Bush still believed in the idea. To cut back would be to admit that the idea was wrong, that the money spent so far -- over $100 billion since Ronald Reagan sparked its revival nearly twenty years earlier -- had been a waste. Maybe it would work one day. Some enemies might think it works now. Menawhile, there was still the hope that America's enemies might be vanquished, that the axis of evil would collapse, and that freedom would supplant tyranny across the planet.

As Bush began his second term, he adopted this hope as an article of faith and as the centerpiece of his foreign policy.

(pp. 126-129):

After September 11, the Bush White House was looking for new ideas to deal with this new threat, ideas that went beyond traditional Realism. The PNAC report seemed to fit the times,a nd the PNAC authors were well placed to argue its case.

On June 1, 2002, President Bush delivered the commencement address at West Point and laid out a new doctrine -- a "Bush doctrine" -- on national security. The doctrines of deterrence and containment, which served the nation well in the Cold War, were, he said, obsolete. "Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend," the speech declared. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver their weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. . . . If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge." That is, we must take "preemptive action."

The argument in Rice's Foreign Affairs article -- that rogue regimes were living on "borrowed time" and that they can be dealt with through classic deterrence -- fell by the wayside.

At this point, though, Bush had not yet drawn the link between security and freedom, the link that would animate his second inaugural address. That connection clicked three weeks later, on June 20, when Dick Cheney flew to a resort in Beaver Creek, Colorado, to chair the World Forum, the annual conference of the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI was Washington's leading neocon think tank. It has served as a Republican cabinet-in-exile while Clinton was president, and it was riding high now that many of its denizens from those years were back in power.

At that conference, Cheney heard a galvanizing speech by Natan Sharansky. [ . . . ]

Many of those at the AEI World Forum knew that President Bush was about to decide on an administration policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perle, who at the time was chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Advisory Board, had persuaded Sharansky to deliver the forum's keynote address, in hopes that he might have an impact.

Nine months had passed since the September 11 attacks, but they still shaped the way Americans thought about everything related to foreign policy. Sharansky knew this -- he felt the same way -- and he placed the topic of his speech in that context.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he began, was "not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East," but rather a key battle in "the first world war of the twenty-first century, waged between the world of terrorism and the world of democracy." Just as the Cold War divided the world into democracy and Communism, so, after 9/11, have we returned "to the world of two poles" -- this time, "democracy and terrorism." The West's key task, he said, was "to expand the world our enemies try to destroy" -- that is, "to export democracy."

He urged America not to push for a Palestinian state -- not yet. Yasser Arabat, the PLO chairman, was a dictator and a terrorist; the mere granting of statehood would not turn him into a responsible leader, because he would still be a dictator and, therefore, would still lead a terrorist state. [ . . . ]

Sharansky acknowledged that many people thought Arabs and democracy were incompatible, but he recalled that many people had said the same thing about Russians and, before that, at the end of World War II, about the Japanese. Yet democracy had triumphed in Russia and Japan, and it could triumph in the Middle East, too. "Democracy is for everybody!" he exclaimed. (The text of the speech printed the sentence in italics.) "What a powerful weapon, democracy! What a drug for the people!" Not only does it allow people the freedom to say and d o as they pleased, but -- because it makes leaders accountable to the people, and because people want to live in peace -- it is also, Sharansky said, "the best guarantee of security."

A nation's interests and ideals, as one.

Cheney had spoken with Sharansky a few times over the years. They were scheduled to meet for a half hour after the speech. They ended up talking for an hour and a half. Cheney said he would pass Sharansky's comments on to the president.

Four days later, in the White House Rose Garden, Bush gave his much-anticipated speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its theme came straight out of Sharansky's AEI address. The formation of an independent state and Israel's withdrawal from its territories, he said, should be preceded by -- and explicitly linked to -- the Palestinians' move toward democracy.

"I call on the Palestinians to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," Bush said. "I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." These new leaders, Bush predicted (following Sharansky to a T), will be able to work out security arrangements with Israel. And after that, "the United States will support the creation of a Palestinian state."

The problem, of course, was that the Palestinians never got the hang of democracy -- they kept electing unapproved ("compromised by terror") leaders, the proof of their inadequacy being Israel's inability to work out the requisite security arrangements. The neocons are often charged with being agents not just of Israel but of the Likud bloc; in fact, Bush picked an even stranger bed fellow, one far to the right of Likud (pp. 129-130):

Sharansky was on a plane heading back to Israel when Bush delivered the speech. Perle later called him on the phone to tell him about it. "He was speaking your words," Perle told him. Sharansky was thrilled. The news, he wrote later, was "almost too good to be true."

In Israel, Sharansky was widely viewed as an obstructionist to peace talks. Long before the AEI Forum, he had presented his plan to Ariel Sharon's government, which brusquely rejected it. There was no chance Arafat would stp down or allow pluralism. Maybe Sharansky was right; maybe that meant there could be no peace as long as Arafat was in charge. But to make Palestinian democracy a precondition for talks was equivalent to saying there would be no talks, and not even Sharon was willing to go that far.

(pp. 144-145):

The crucial thing was that his views fits. They provided an intellectual foundation, an air of legitimacy, for Bush's view of the world. In a pre-inaugural interview with the Washington Times, Bush said, "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy." On CNN, he elaborated on the plug, "Sharansky's book," he said, "confirmed . . . what I believe . . . that deep in everybody's soul -- everybody's soul -- is this deep desire to be free. That's what I believe. No matter where you were raised, no matter your religion, people want to be free. And that a foreign policy, particularly from a nation that is free, ought to be based upon that thought."

(p. 153):

Rumsfeld wanted to get into Iraq, crush Saddam's army, overthrow his regime, then get out. The whole point of military transformation, as he saw it, was to demonstrate that America could project power and topple rogue regimes with a small, light force and that, therefore, it could do so repeatedly, anytime, anywhere, at low cost and little effort. To get involved in a serious postwar occupation -- stabilization, security, nation-building, and all the rest -- would nullify the concept; it would bog down lots of troops for a long time.

In short, Rumsfeld did not miscalculate how many troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq after the war, as some critics later charged; he understood the calculations all too well. Rather than ratchet up the troop levels to meet that mission, he simply side-stepped the mission. He wasn't interested in it, didn't think postwar stabilization was what a modern military -- especially a transformational military -- ought to be doing.

(pp. 155-156):

Here, though, Rumsfeld's plan hit two roadblocks. The first, unexpectedly, was President bush. At an NSC meeting in February, a few weeks before the invasion, Feith mentioned in passing Chalabi's impending government. Bush interrupted him. We're not choosing anybody as Iraq's leader, he said. That's for the Iraqi people to decide. A few days later, Wolfowitz, who had not been at the earlier meeting and apparently had not been briefed on it by Feith, brought up Chalabi again. Bush lashed out. This is about democracy, Bush said. He had nothing for or against Chalabi, but the United States was not going to put its "thumb on the scale."

Now Rumsfeld and his assistants were in a spot. The invasion was about to go forward with the small force that Rumsfeld had demanded. He was convined it would be enough to beat the Iraqi Army and topple Saddam; in that, he turned out to be right and the generals turned out to be wrong. But his solution for postwar order -- his excuse for not thinking about, much less authorizing a plan for, Phase IV -- had just been overridden by the president.

Some defense secretaries might have hurriedly prepared a new plan. Rumsfeld prepared an end run. Right after Saddam's regime fell and American troops took the capital, Wolfowitz supplied Chalabi and more than six hundred of his Free Iraqi Fighters with a transport plane to Nasiriya.

Then came the second roadblock -- the Iraqi people. After a brief flurry of excitement, Chalabi never sparked popular support. He allied himself with one political party after the next, ran some ministries in transition governments, and headed a de-Baathification board for a while. But he alienated the various party chiefs. By the time parliamentary elections took place, he ran on his own ticket -- and didn't attract enough votes to win a seat.

The only option left for Rumsfeld, at this point, was denial. The Department of Defense had executive authority over postwar Iraq. But by June 2003, just a couple months into the occupation, it was clear to several officials who watched him at NSC meetings on the subject that the secretary of defense had lost interest.

(p. 163):

But it indicated no such thing. Had Bush looked at his own country's history, he would have seen that the election sporting one of the highest turnouts ever, with 81 percent of the eligible population voting, was the election of 1860 -- the election right before the American Civil War. He would have seen, in other words, that high turnouts don't necessarily reflect great harmony, that they can also presage implacable conflict and impassioned violence.

In the 2005 Iraqi election, Sunnis voted almost entirely for Sunni parties, Shiites voted almost entirely for religious Shiite parties (the explicitly secular Shiite candidates won only a handful of seats), and the Kurds ratified a nonbinding referendum to secede from Iraq altogether. The Iraqis didn't vote for a free society; rather, each ethnic or religious group voted for a society in which it would dominate the rival groups. And the act of voting that way -- the politicization of social tensions -- hardened their mutual hostilities.

When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006 (pp. 171-172):

When asked at her press conference why she hadn't embarked on shuttle diplomacy already, Rice replied, "I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling," but "it wouldn't have been clear what I was shuttling to do." She added, "I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante. I think that would be a mistake."

Then came the remark that dropped jaws and made headlines. "What we're seeing here," she said, "is, in a sense, the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East. And whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East."

(p. 178):

However, out in that world, the view was very different. Against the backdrop of Bush's rhetoric about freedom, his maneuverings for material interest appeared more venal than usual; and against those maneuverings, his lofty rhetoric rang especially hollow.

For two brief periods -- just after Saddam Hussein was toppled, when American power seemed supreme, and during the Orange and Cedar Revolutions, when it seemed that freedom might really be "on the march" -- some leaders in the Middle East wondered if their days of unfettered power were numbered, if they might have to adopt political reforms to survive.

But before long, they concluded that Bush's calls for reform were bogus, a cynical veneer for big-power domination. They saw the war in Iraq as purely a play for Middle Eastern oil or as a crusade against Islam or simply as a sign of incompetence. And as American troops became bogged down in Iraq, it became clear that Bush had little leverage to press the issue in any case. Because they tought Bush didn't believe his rhetoric about democracy, they didn't have to take it seriously either. They could clamp down on their oppressed people even more, without consequence.

In their attempt to pass off America's ideals and interests as one and the same, President Bush and his advisers damaged both.

(pp. 183-183):

When Karen Hughes was appointed to the job [Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy] in March 2005, Condoleezza Rice introduced her at a press conference, saying, "We must do more to confront the hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths, and get out the truth."

A few months earlier, Charles Wolf, a longtime analyst at the RAND Corporation, wrote a paper on the subject entitled "Public Diplomacy: How to Think About It and Improve It." Almost twenty years earlier, Wolf had served with Andy Marshall on the panel that foresaw the economic downfall of the Soviet Union. Now, Wolf wrote, referring to the declining image of the United States, "Misunderstanding of American values is not the principal source of anti-Americanism." Many foreigners understand America quite well; they simply don't like what they see. It isn't myths, Wolf noted, but rather "some U.S. policies" that "have been, are, and will continue to be major sources of anti-Americanism."

Contrasts Bush's strategies with the founding precepts of the cold war era, under Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Kennan (p. 191):

By contrast, Bush's strategies neither succeeded nor endured -- not even through the two terms of his presidency -- because they did not fit the realities of his era. They were based not on a grasp of technology, history, or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith, and a willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.

Those in charge of his policies cared little about the details of warfare, knew little about the realities of the Middle East, and had not thought through what made freedom work in their own country, much less what might make it work elsewhere.

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 proscrib