Asked how U.S. leaders had framed America's nuclear-weapons policy, Robert McNamara spoke candidly: "Each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time. But the result was insane." In this compelling sequel to The Making of the Atom Bomb (1986) and Dark Sun (1995), Rhodes details the historical circumstances that made each nuclear decision seem deceptively rational while exposing the overarching reality of horrific insanity. Readers thus see how American and Soviet experts invoked past experience with conventional weaponry to justify the stockpiling of nuclear bombs for use on a vast arsenal of missiles, each capable of annihilating entire cities. Such perilous illogic brought the world not security but rather near-calamity when a 1983 NATO exercise almost prompted a nuclear exchange. The illusions of nuclear strategists sustained an even ruder shock in 1986 when the Chernobyl meltdown spewed radioactive fallout across Europe. Still, hardliners on both sides would have perpetuated the arms race had a farm boy from Russia (Gorbachev) and a lifeguard from America (Reagan) not defied cold war orthodoxy when they met at Reykjavik. Conservatives may complain that Rhodes gives too little credit to Reagan, whose commitment to the Star Wars missile-defense system he blames for almost derailing disarmament talks. But Rhodes gives ample reason for praising Gorbachev as the daring leader an imperiled world needed. An insightful chronicle of epoch-shaping events. Christensen, Bryce
Review
“Every age finds the writers it needs, and the nuclear age has found Richard Rhodes.”
-The Nation
“Throughout his assiduously researched work, Rhodes cites stunning statistics to support his contention that the nuclear competition has run amok . . . dense with crucial, revealing information obtained from personal interviews and newly declassified documents, Rhodes’s Arsenals of Folly is a dramatic and penetrating investigation of the nuclear arms race and its eventual end.”
-The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A terrifying overview of the global potential for killing.”
-The Economist
“Rhodes performs the remarkable feat of reconstructing all the niggling, the misunderstanding, the moments of obtuseness in a way that proves dramatic precisely in its repetitiveness and frustration.”
-Newsday
“His artful narrative contains some real gems.”
-New York Times Book Review
“Highly detailed and gripping . . . a chilling conclusion.”
-Scientific American
“Rich and riveting . . . a splendid writer . . . harrowing.”
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Using an impressive range of sources, clean writing and a clear sense of the dramatic, Rhodes triumphs.”
-Rocky Mountain News
“As a contribution to our understanding of the latter half of the 20th century, Rhodes’s achievement is on a par with Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years trilogy and Robert Caro’s monumental ongoing biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.”
-The Mercury News (San Jose, CA)
“Rhodes is not only an outstanding researcher and historian, he is a superb writer who enraptures the reader with a gripping narrative. Upon reading this important book, one will walk away ruminating on the unspeakable horror of the nuclear apocalypse that was, it often seems miraculously, avoided during the Cold War.”
-The Sunday Star-Ledger
“Stylistically, Arsenals of Folly is often quite distinguished. The impressive opening chapter–which describe the Chernobyl disaster in a controlled but morbidly involving tone–is an achievement . . . as an allegory of manipulated intelligence, miscalculation, and fatal ideology, it is alarmingly relevant.”
-The Tennessean
“No finer manual for learning from the mistakes of our past than [this] valuable book.”
-Seed magazine
“Detailed and dramatic . . . devastating commentary on the perilous nature of the nuclear arms race.”
-Houston Chronicle
“Intriguing insight . . . Rhodes masterfully dissects decades of what he considers reckless and misguided policy decisions that led the United States and the Soviet Union to expand their nuclear arsenals beyond all logic . . . The author’s deftly painted character portraits–he mentions Gorbachev’s “southern Russian accent and hillbilly grammar”–make for an engrossing narrative.”
-The American Heritage
“Absorbing . . . “
-The Seattle Times
“With skillful insight, Richard Rhodes has woven accounts by Soviet and American insiders into a dark and troubling history of superpower insanity. He makes you wonder when we'll wake up, since some of the American villains keep coming back to haunt us: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle.”
-David Shipler, Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams
“Richard Rhodes, our leading historian of nuclear weapons, has written a powerful, clear-eyed account of the nuclear arms race, focusing on Mikhail Gorbachev as the heroic figure in the history of mankind’s 20th Century flirtation with oblivion. Rhodes gives the still-neglected happy ending to that flirtation the sweeping, insightful, and compelling treatment it deserves. So yes, this is an “important” book, but it reads like a political thriller.”
-Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened
“Compelling . . . an insightful chronicle of epoch-shaping events.”
-Booklist
"Rhodes accomplishes what neither American nor Soviet political cultures could manage over a half-century of nuclear cold war–to find the flesh-and-blood human reality on both sides. Rich with revelation, insight and detail, riveting as a powerful novel, Arsenals of Folly is transcendent history, haunting our memory and experience."
-Roger Morris, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America
About the Author
Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-two books, including novels, history, journalism, and letters. The Making of the Atomic Bomb won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dark Sun, about the development of the hydrogen bomb, was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in History. An affiliate of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, he lectures to college and professional audiences. He lives with his wife near Half Moon Bay, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: To the Chernobyl Sarcophagus
On the Saturday morning in April 1986 when the alarms went off at the Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences, in a forest outside Minsk, the nuclear physicist Stanislav Shushkevich thought the institute's reactor was bleeding radiation. Its fuel assemblies, sealed inside aluminum cassettes at the bottom of a deep, stainless-steel tank full of distilled water, might have sprung a leak. Or something might have spilled in the institute's radiochemistry lab. Dosimeter operators began working their way methodically through the labs and offices and found radiation everywhere. It was in people's hair and clinging to their clothes. It registered two hundred times normal on the air filters. It was near danger levels at the front door.
The dosimetrists moved outside and discovered it there as well: on the sidewalk, on the grass, on the periwinkle crocuses pushing up through the dark litter of the forest floor. So the institute wasn't the source. An order over the public-address system warned everyone to stay indoors. Someone called the Lithuanian nuclear-power complex at Ignalina, one hundred miles northwest, and radiation was everywhere there too. Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, was farther away, two hundred miles southeast, where four big RBMK* thousand-megawatt reactors were lined up end to end in a building almost a mile long. Hundreds of people worked there, but the phones rang unanswered. Something was wrong at Chernobyl.
By afternoon, institute chemists had found radioactive iodine in the fallout, which confirmed that a reactor had exploded. For radioactive gas and smoke from Chernobyl to have reached Minsk, the explosion must have occurred sometime during the night. How much radioactivity had been released? How much more would follow? Why had no one warned them?
Shushkevich, fifty-two, a solid, ample man with a ruddy face and a high, domed forehead fringed with graying brown hair, was friendly and avuncular but shrewdly intelligent. He was vice-provost of the Byelorussian University in Minsk, a liberal humanist in the tradition of Andrey Sakharov. The Soviet Union's change of direction since the death of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985, just thirteen months before, had filled him with hope. Chernenko, an emphysemic general secretary with the soul of a retired file clerk, had served as a placeholder between the reform-minded but ailing former KGB chief Yuri Andropov and his vigorous young heir apparent, Mikhail Gorbachev. At Chernenko's death his private safe had turned up no personal diary or other intimate record, only a large cache of money no one could account for. Good riddance, Shushkevich had thought: "I was the first at the university to put a portrait of Gorbachev on the wall."
The night of Chernenko's death, Raisa Maksimovna, Mikhail Gorbachev's wife and partner, pacing beside him in the garden of their country house near Moscow, heard him say resolutely, "We just can't go on like this." The next day, 11 March 1985, Gorbachev had been elected general secretary at a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee. In his acceptance speech immediately after his election he had called for open government and accountability: "I emphasized the need for transparency (glasnost) in the work of Party, Soviet, state and public organizations," he wrote later. He had laid out in detail his other fundamental goal, perestroika—economic restructuring, salvaging the nearly moribund Soviet economy—at a Central Committee plenum the following month, stressing "the elimination of everything that interferes with development."
The huge Soviet military-industrial complex, which insinuated itself into every corner of the Soviet economy and consumed at least 40 percent of the state budget, headed his list for cutbacks, and in a letter delivered to President Ronald Reagan on 15 January 1986 he had broached a proposal without precedent across the four dangerous decades of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear-arms race: "A concrete program," as he described it during a press conference in Moscow later that day, ". . . for the complete liquidation of nuclear weapons throughout the world . . . before the end of the present century." Opening to such unprecedented initiative, 1986 had seemed a year of immense possibility. Now a disaster loomed, of consequences yet unknown, and radiation blew north from Chernobyl.
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 into the 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 burned 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 Novos...
