I am grateful for a world free of nuclear threats.

Review: 'Arsenals of Folly' recalls nuclear threat (click title to entry)
BY SCOTT McLEMEE Special to Newsday
November 18, 2007
ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, by Richard Rhodes. Knopf, 400 pp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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