Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

By Richard Rhodes

Knopf, 386 pp., illustrated, $28.95

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, an op-ed piece in The New York Times celebrated the evident fact that, with the nuclear arms race finally over, humanity no longer needed to worry about the atomic bomb. The celebration was premature. Today, the Bomb is back. And, as it turns out, the nuclear arms race is not so much over as proceeding in a new - and probably more dangerous - direction.

Richard Rhodes, the author of two previous, deservedly popular books on nuclear weapons - "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and "Dark Sun" - has written a third book in his series on what now seems, in retrospect, Nuclear Arms Race I.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Rhodes's new book is its focus on two dirty little secrets about nuclear strategy during the Cold War that the experts never liked to talk about: the first being that, while both superpowers talked deterrence, they were actually planning for a possible preemptive attack - which, in the Pentagon's official definition, is "an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent." The other, dirtier secret is that at least three American presidents were presented with plans for a surprise nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, otherwise known as preventive war - "a war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable and that to delay would involve greater risk."

In 1949, President Truman rejected the advice of those who urged that he strangle the Soviet nuclear program in its cradle. Eight years later, Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, showed one defense expert the door after his visitor suggested that the United States launch a Pearl Harbor-style nuclear attack on the Russians. President Kennedy was reportedly intrigued, during the 1961 Berlin crisis, with the plan that aides gave him for what they called a "clever first strike" - a scheme to disarm the Soviets by destroying Russian bombers and missiles on the ground. But in every case cooler heads prevailed.

Still, as Rhodes lets the reader know, it was a near thing. The great danger of the Cold War was that an accident or miscalculation could occur during a crisis, when both superpowers engaged in a game of chicken known as mutually reinforcing alerts. The unthinkable almost occurred in 1962, when the United States and the USSR faced off over the clandestine introduction of Soviet missiles into Cuba.

Bad as the consequences of a nuclear war were believed to be back then, the reality would almost certainly have been much worse. Incredibly, despite the money and talent lavished on the weapons themselves, the planning for their use now seems both short-sighted and slipshod. It was not until the early 1980s that strategists realized how the dust and debris kicked up by nuclear explosions might enshroud the earth, bringing about a so-called nuclear winter and perhaps casting humanity into Stygian darkness. Even more remarkable is that war planners, when estimating prospective casualties in a nuclear war, looked only at fallout and blast damage, neglecting to factor in the effects of fire - even though the majority of deaths in World War II's massed bomber raids on Hamburg and Tokyo had been caused by the resulting conflagration, which literally sucked the air out of the lungs of people huddled in underground shelters. In the 1960s, US nuclear strategists thought that an all-out nuclear war -what strategist Herman Kahn famously called a "wargasm" - might leave 285 million Russians, Chinese, and Europeans dead. More recent estimates are that such a war could have killed nearly a billion people, almost a third of the human population at that time.