Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. By Richard Rhodes. (New York: Knopf, 2007. 386 pp. $28.95, ISBN 978-0-375-41413-8.)

Why did the United States and the Soviet Union amass tens of thousands of nuclear bombs even when they knew a war fought with those weapons would leave no winners behind? This is the central question of Richard Rhodes's masterful new book, the third in a projected four-volume history of the nuclear age. The first two books. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) and Dark Sun (1995) offer the definitive histories of the origins of America's atomic and thermonuclear weapons. Like those studies, Arsenals of Folly draws on an impressive bibliography of secondary sources, memoirs, interviews, and primary sources. The result is an engrossing history of the Cold War arms race.