Arsenal of Words

Arms Race Chronicler Says U.S. Repeated Cold War Mistakes Before the Hot War in Iraq

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.

Richard Rhodes and Ronald Reagan, two sons of the American Midwest, may not have had too much else in common back in the autumn of 1983. But there was this:

Both men were haunted by the fear that the world might end in nuclear fire.

Rhodes is a prolific writer of nonfiction whose latest book, "Arsenals of Folly," chronicles the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. (He's scheduled to talk about it this afternoon at Politics and Prose in Northwest Washington.) In 1983, he was living in Kansas City and was hard at work on his breakthrough book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." Part of why he'd chosen the topic, he recalls, is that "it felt to a lot of us as if we were on a collision course with nuclear war."

As he worked, the TV version of his fears was playing out in Lawrence, Kan., just up the road.

ABC's movie "The Day After" featured some of Rhodes's friends as extras. He was familiar with the pile of rubble -- actually a recently demolished hospital -- used to symbolize the bombed-out city. Still, he found himself shocked when he turned on the tube in late November and saw simulated mushroom clouds loom over the landscape in which he'd grown up.

Reagan, meanwhile, had screened an advance print of "The Day After" at Camp David in October. It shocked him as well.

"The image of Jason Robards walking through the radioactive ashes of Lawrence," wrote Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, "left him dazed, and he entered into his diary the first and only admission I have been able to find in his papers that he was 'greatly depressed.' "

The president's mood was reinforced, that autumn of 1983, by a real-world scare. The paranoid old despots in the Kremlin -- rattled by, among other things, Reagan's anti-Soviet rhetoric, the rapid rise in American military spending and an elaborate NATO military exercise they thought might be a cover for the real thing -- had come to the enormously dangerous conclusion that the United States was planning a nuclear first strike.

Shaken, Reagan signaled to the Soviets that this was not the case. Determined to reduce the threat of Armageddon, he later joined the reform-minded new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the unprecedented arms negotiations that, while not immediately fruitful, heralded the approaching end of the Cold War.

As for Reagan's fellow Midwesterner:

Rhodes published "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" in 1986, the same year Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Nine years later he published "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb," the second volume in what he now expects will be a nuclear quartet. The fourth book, he says, will chronicle efforts to deactivate the many thousands of nuclear weapons that remain -- despite the breakup of the Soviet Union -- on hair-trigger alert.