Arsenals Of Folly, The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
, Richard Rhodes.This is my second post on thoughts on Arsonals of Folly, by Richard Rhodes.
::Once again I found Regan to be a man of contradictions. Deeply religious yet astrologers where used?
::It's well documented and mentioned throughout that the arms race basically bankrupt the Soviet Union. Yet I thought it interesting that Rhodes quotes Marriner Eccles 'as long ago as the 1960's that "over-kill spending of the military" was " responsible for our financial inability to adequately meet the problems of our cities (poverty, crime, riots, pollution) and our rapidly expanding educational requirements".
Rhodes goes on to quote others as well to argue his point that the USA as far as infrastructure and other problems was behind other Western country's because of its military spending.
::That the same Neo-Conservatives who came up with exaggerated claims of "weapons of mass destruction" eg Dick Cheyney, Paul Wolforwitz, Richard Pearl, Donald Rumsfeld. Where very much behind telling and again exaggerating the Soviet nuclear capability. It was a good that Regan was often motivated by his own intuition or 'hunches' and entertained and followed Gorbachev offers, rather than his 'conservative' voices in his own camp.
::I like the summing up paragraphs
"The politics of both sides were not moral because they put the human world at mortal risk, with no reasonable gain in security, for domestic advantage and the international play of power. Robert Oppenheimer saw the dishonesty as early as 1953, when he wrote sardonically in Forigen Affair
The very least that we can say is that, looking ten years ahead, it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us, and small comfort that they are only about half as big as we are. The very least we can conclude is that our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the vast munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth... We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put and end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life."
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