How we blew it

The history of the world came down to this. Ronald Reagan is standing in a room in Iceland with three men: Richard Perle, the young hawk; Paul Nitze, the old sage; George Shultz, the steady counsel. Mikhail Gorbachev is upstairs. “Everything could be decided right now,” Gorbachev mutters as he paces.

The four Americans are discussing a massive arms-control deal, and right now it depends on minutiae. The two sides already have agreed to fantastic reductions in the nuclear weapons that long have threatened to devastate the globe. For 20 years, the superpowers have negotiated for inches. But today, feet, yards, even miles, are given up in the margins of yellow pads. The whole deal hinges on whether, for the next 10 years, the Americans will agree to confine research on space-based missile defense to laboratories.

Reagan asks Perle for advice. He says no; the Soviet deal would end the president’s dream of a shield in the sky. The president then asks Nitze and Shultz. Sign the deal, they urge, the weight of decades of missed opportunities bearing down upon them. Reagan leaves the room and goes to talk to Gorbachev. He’s chosen sides with Perle and the deal is off.

How pathetic and maddening it would have been if that moment turned out, as it seemed then, to have been the one opportunity the world would get at a grand bargain between the U.S. and the USSR. Missile defense, as we all know now, was a chimera. It wasn’t going to work, whether research was confined to a laboratory or not. Ten years weren’t going to make a difference, nor would 30. Most shockingly, no one even knew at that loaded moment what the heck a laboratory was anyway: Did it mean a basement cluttered with test tubes, or could an orbiting space station count?

Richard Rhodes describes this particular episode masterfully in his new book, “Arsenals of Folly.” He’s a splendid writer and offers a rich and riveting account of those broken 1986 negotiations in Reykjavik. The same is true of many of the other scenes in the book, particularly that year’s explosion at Chernobyl, a harrowing account of which takes the reader through the entire first chapter.

And yet, ultimately, this book doesn’t satisfy as much as the author’s two previous tomes on nuclear weapons: “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.” Those volumes ended in triumph, or at least massive explosions. This volume doesn’t have a climax -- fortunately for humanity, but unfortunately for the storytelling.

As Gorbachev paced the halls, a giant pot was boiling in his country that would soon overflow and bring far more change than anyone that day in Iceland had imagined. Even the arms deals that eventually were completed would be dwarfed by the effect of the USSR’s economic and political change. In Rhodes’ previous books, the characters unleashed forces more powerful -- politically, technologically and morally -- than they realized at the time. In this book, they deal with issues that turn out to be much smaller than they thought.

Also holding back the book is Rhodes’ description of the Americans in power during the Cold War’s endgame. In his memoir of his abusive childhood, “A Hole in the World,” Rhodes wrote that his very different books are connected because they all focus on “men of character who confront violence, resist it or endure it and discover beyond its inhumanity a narrow margin of hope.” That useful formula, however, doesn’t apply here to anyone on the American side.

In “Arsenals of Folly,” only Gorbachev plays that role. He rose to power in a brutal government whose domestic policy kept everyone at home afraid and whose foreign policy terrified the rest of the world. Once in office, Gorbachev didn’t seem that different from his predecessors. He lied about the scale of the disaster at Chernobyl, endangering the health of millions around the globe. But his country’s economic crisis, and his realization of the horrors of a potential nuclear conflict, eventually changed him into the man of perestroika and glasnost.

The Americans in “Arsenals of Folly” are all bumbling or motivated by demons. They confront violence and seem to revel in it; they don’t discover any hope as they waste American treasure and almost spill American blood. The arms buildup they urge doesn’t give the United States leverage in negotiations; during Reagan’s first term, it just frightens the Soviets from negotiating at all. Things turn out well eventually in spite of the Reagan administration, not because of it.

As Rhodes sees it, Reagan terrified the Soviets so much that the American president shares some of the blame for the deaths of the men and women on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by a nervous air defense after drifting into Soviet airspace in 1983. More dangerously, an American battle simulation that year called Able Archer almost convinced the Soviets that we were about to attack -- a misunderstanding that could have led them to launch missiles preemptively. “[T]he United States and the Soviet Union, apes on a treadmill, inadvertently blundered close to nuclear war. . . ,” Rhodes writes. “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.”

Rhodes does admit that Reagan genuinely wanted a transforming peace and a workable missile defense. But to the author, it was the dream of a simpleton who didn’t understand game theory and who was motivated by religion and the supernatural. Rhodes ends one chapter by noting that Reagan commented to Gorbachev that he believed in reincarnation and wondered if, in a past life, he had been the inventor of the shield.

Is Rhodes right about Reagan and the other Americans in power when the Cold War ended? People have debated this for 20 years, and they won’t stop anytime soon. Archives have been opened; letters have been found; Soviets leaders have talked -- including many to Rhodes. Yet no one has changed his position.

This doesn’t necessarily mean Rhodes is wrong. It just makes the core narrative of this book familiar, and it means most of his characters don’t have the same compelling arc as in his previous works. “Arsenals of Folly” is still a very good read. But it’s not a masterpiece -- which is what we’ve come to expect from Richard Rhodes.