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Arsenals of Folly
- The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
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Arsenals of Folly
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Publisher's Summary
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 10 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.
What the critics say
"The clarity of the historical record reinforces Rhodes' fiercely held political convictions." (Publishers Weekly)
“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)
“Every age finds the writers it needs, and the nuclear age has found Richard Rhodes.” (The Nation)
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What listeners say about Arsenals of Folly
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- HittsMcGee
- 2019-04-18
Richard Rhodes does it again!
Another classic by Dick Rhodes, the third installment in his four part series on nuclear weapons. I am, and forever will be, a devout fan of the first in this series, "The Making of The Atomic Bomb." "Dark Sun" captures the early nuclear arms race as the two adversaries obtain thermonuclear bombs. "Arsenals of Folly" confluently picks up on the story of the Cold War by narrating the escalation of nuclear warheads upon increasingly powerful and accurate ICBMs. As always, Rhodes does a swell job of providing not only geopolitical perspectives on every major event of the Cold War, but also highly personal stories of the world leaders, from Eisenhower and Krushchev to Bush and Gorbachev. If you want to learn about endless debates of Reagan's Star Wars, this is the book for you.
Rhodes focusses on the rise of Gorbachev, painting a clear picture of how the young, starving farm boy grew into the most revolutionary Soviet leader since Lenin (my personal hot take...but he did win a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Cold War).
In all honesty, however, this book misses the charm that The Making of the Atomic Bomb possessed. In my opinion, TMAB remains the best history book on nuclear weapons, because of how intimately the scientists' stories are told, and how the tension of nuclear war gradually yet consistently rose throughout the entire book. Also, I'm a fan of science, so Dark Sun and Arsenals of Folly, which lack depth in science content are lower on my list of Rhodes novels.
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