Product Description

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb comes this brilliant account of the post-war superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war -- and then nearly agreed to abolish nuclear weapons. In a narrative that reads like a thriller, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms build-up in the early 1980s led the Soviets to conclude that the U.S. must be preparing for a nuclear war -- only for Reagan, out of deep conviction, to launch the arms-reduction campaign of his second presidential term and set the stage for the famous 1986 summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, and the breakthroughs that followed. Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation that has become available only in the past ten years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising -- a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #267431 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

About the Author
Richard Rhodes is the author of several books. He received the Pulitzer prize for THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB and the History of Science Society's Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize for DARK SUN.

Customer Reviews

Proving you cannot judge a book by its cover - or title
Put simply this book bored me - it is misdescribed as a history of the nuclear arms race. It is more a discourse on the Reagan-Gorbachev relationship and the end of the cold war.

Its dull to read, and just lacks something that other books in this subject seem to have, because lets face it you need to have some background knowledge about the technical side (and I do)to know what they are even talking about (payloads, throw weights, MIRVS, MARVS, CEP's,

Re-title and re-package this book! This is one occasion when it is not what it says on the tin (sorry but it had to be said).

Slightly less than the title suggests.
This is a valuable history of the closing stages of the {first?} "Cold War" - concentrating particularly on the Reagan/Gorbachev encounters and the resulting agreements to reduce strategic and tactical weapons in Europe. Written in Richard Rhode's usual authoritative style, with copious references to source documents and many personal interviews with some of the surviving protagonists on both sides, my only reservation is that the book concentrates on the 'end' of the Nuclear Arms Race, rather than on it's making, as one might have inferred from the title. Yes, the author mentions both superpowers' native Military Industrial Complexes as being among the prime reasons for sustaining the billions/trillions of dollars expenditure over some fifty years, but the book doesn't really give any detailed history of the major developments during that period - e.g. the misleading claims made by various American presidential candidates {of both parties} during the 1950's over the so-called 'missile gap', which lead to a vast accelaration in the numbers of nuclear delivery systems and warheads by the time of the 1962 Cuban crisis.
Where the book really does score, and where it's historic relevance extends right up to the present, is that it highlights the extremely pervasive negative influences of some of the people surrounding Reagan -e.g. Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld - who simply couldn't accept the notion of nuclear parity, or the point of any effective reductions in the massive overkill potential of the superpowers, and tried to sabotage the negotiations at every step. Unfortunately these same people came back to even more influential positions in George W. Bush's administratiions, and as Richard Rhodes just stops short of pointing-out too explicitly, were largely responsible for the nature of the US military responses around the world since 9/11.