Publisher Description
From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar 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 moves like a thriller, Rhodes sheds light on the Reagan administration’s unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s, as well as the arms-reduction campaign that followed, and Reagan’s famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev. Rhodes’s detailed exploration of events of this time constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before. Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation, memoir literature, and oral history that has become available only in the past ten years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War that led to its dramatic end. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising–a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.
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“Not his best work, but certainly worth a read. If you understand the cold war in terms of the west, especially Reagan toppling the Soviet Union, then this is a must read. Rhodes paints a pretty scary picture of the Reagan administration, especially the Neo-Cons like Pearle and Cheney whose world views pushed the expansion of the military industrial complex to new frightening heights. The hero of this book is certainly Gorbachev, and Rhodes describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as much more an internal economic matter,rather than with outside interference from the United States. This book gets you thinking about power,politics, the effects of accepted lies, as well as parallels between the Soviet system and ours. Oh yeah, this book also does a superb job of explaining the folly of SDI, the so-called Star Wars initiative, an idea in Reagan’s fantasy which almost single-handedly destroyed the peace process that unfolded in the later 1980s. I am a huge fan of this Richard Rhodes-do not be dissuaded by my words at the beginning of this review. Anything by him is meaty, scholarly and vividly rendered. I just feel that other works like “Masters of Death,” “Why They Kill?,” and “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” are quite simply superior. I would like to meet the man.”
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Patrick (4 out of 5 stars)
