PHYSICS FLASH
    News from the Department of Physics ~ January 2009

BOOK REVIEW:

Arsenals of folly

by Richard Rhodes
(Knopf, 2007)

Physicists have always had a special interest in nuclear weapons; an uncomfortable feeling of responsibility and perhaps defensiveness. About ten years ago, I found myself sitting at a small coffee table with Hans Bethe and a graduate student. It was morning coffee at a one-day workshop at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC, Santa Barbara. The workshop was honoring the life of Bethe's friend Rudolph Peierls who had recently died. Among many more important things, Peierls made a crucial contribution to dislocation theory which I was working on at the time. Peierls co-authored the 1940 "MAUD" report to the British government on the feasibility of nuclear weapons (with the first reasonably accurate critical mass estimate) on which the Manhattan project was later based. He had also developed the theory of the deuteron with Bethe.
   What to say? Bethe had just given a lucid summary of some of the most important problems he saw in contemporary nuclear physics, about which I knew nothing. He was about 90. I felt about 20. Clearly, the graduate student who joined us at the table was almost as tongue-tied as I was as he offered sugar to one of my greatest heroes in physics, the author of the foundational review article on solid state physics in 1928, and a Nobel laureate for his work on stellar nucleosynthesis. But it happened that I had just read Richard Rhodes's Pulitzer-prize winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which includes a fairly complete biography of Bethe. This gave me an odd feeling of indiscretion - knowing more about his personal life than I should.
   "Was the book broadly accurate?" I asked, filled with a precious sense of the opportunity to get history right.
   "Yes," he said. "Rhodes did an excellent job of telling the Los Alamos story just as I remember it."
   In addition to that book and subsequent books on the hydrogen bomb, bioweapons and others, Richard Rhodes has now written a new book on the cold war and its arms reduction treaties. This story of arms control efforts and how the end of the cold war came about are fascinating. It gives a gripping insider's account of how, in 1983, the Soviet Union became convinced that the United States was

preparing for nuclear war and how the naive President Reagan was able to launch his arms-reduction talks, culminating in his famous Reykjavik meeting with Gorbachev. Along the way, we learn the inside story of the Chernobyl disaster. We are also privy to a fascinating mini-biography of Gorbachev - his work in agricultural reform with his wife, and his success within the party system as a highly gifted manager. One feels the politburo meetings come to life, as they wrestle with a failing command economy, in which, with full price control, there is "no information on true price.” We witness how the politburo - almost in desperation - gives the leadership to Gorbachev and his perestroika program. Gorbachev certainly emerges as a remarkable individual. As Rhodes ponders "how could the system produce such a person?" A man who "in order to preserve his inner self, developed an impenetrable mask, learning to conceal his disdain for those he despised, and to speak with them in their own language”.     
   The book moves between key figures on both sides, leading up to Reykjavik. But the account of the in-fighting between Reagan's advisors (in the light of recent events) is also remarkable. Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz all feature prominently, mostly in defense of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or Star Wars as it came to be known, and in the manipulation of intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat (for internal US purposes) to the extent that we were entirely unable to predict the coming end of the cold war in 1989.

   In the US, the famous intelligence "B team" (Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, Edward Teller, and John Foster) was set up to counter the CIA's more moderate views of Soviet intentions, and contains the seeds of the modern neoconservative movement. The same people were to set up an alternative intelligence center more recently in support of the Iraq war. Here, the Livermore Star Wars physicists around Teller were deeply involved in shaping intelligence to influence policy.  

   The most dramatic part of the book describes the true turning point which precipitated the end of the cold war - the Reykjavik summit in 1986. Gorbachev arrived with radical new proposals to eliminate all nuclear weapons, and viewed his struggle to get this accepted by the politburo as far more difficult than getting it accepted by the U.S., since it accorded broadly with Reagan's (but not Reagan's advisors’) thinking. At the first meeting (Reagan and

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BOOK REVIEW: Arsenals
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Gorbachev alone with only two translators), Reagan began with a wonderful comment, "You and I can achieve anything, provided we don’t care who gets the credit.” In Gorbachev's later opinion, the meetings actually succeeded because they were small, personal and direct - the best way to end the threat of nuclear war. Human rights and Star Wars were difficult, potentially show-stopper, issues. "Trust, but verify," said Reagan, using the three words of Russian he had learned so many times that Gorbachev covered his ears when he heard it coming. Both had cards with notes. Gorbachev later commented that his own proposals were so radical that Reagan spent minutes looking fruitlessly for a card with the answer to his questions. Reagan had been prepared for a different agenda, unaware that for Gorabchev this was the decisive summit, not a preparatory one.

   After days of detailed discussion on throw-weight limits and different classes of weapons, days during which Reagan was constantly trying to convince the skeptical Russians that Star Wars (SDI) was merely "like a gas mask, a purely defensive weapon which makes war less likely", the climax came on the last day.

The international press corps waited outside in the freezing Iceland winter for the world leaders to emerge with a statement which would end the threat of nuclear war. Advisors on both sides had worked through the night.

   The tiny U.S. embassy in Reykjavik meant that the U.S. team wound up in the bathroom. The embassy was so short on copying machines that U.S. copies of the agreement were made on Russian carbon paper. Reagan sat on the toilet, and someone found a plank to put across the bathtub for a seat. Surrounded by Perle, Nitze and George Shultz and with minutes to go, Reagan took a vote on whether to accept Gorbachev's proposal that the SDI be permitted under laboratory research conditions only – a point from which all other prepared agreements on massive arms reductions would follow. Nitze and Shultz voted to accept

Gorbachev's proposal. Perle voted against it. Reagan sided with Perle. It has never been clear if Perle saw SDI as the political tool it was, or actually believed it could work. So Reykjavik - where both sides had agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons - failed on the issue of militarization of space and the vote of Richard Perle.

   Despite this, most of the proposed reductions were in fact implemented because of the breakup of the Soviet Union soon after the summit. The breakup resulted from several factors - the antagonism between the states of the USSR, the emergence of a remarkable leader (Gorbachev), the inevitable failure of a command-style economy, and U.S. expenditures on defense which the Russians were forced to attempt to follow. James Baker said to Gorbachev in 1990, "I have never met a politician with as much bravery and courage as you have, and President George Bush shares this opinion.”

   Rhodes ends his book as follows: "Far from victory in the Cold War, the arms race expenditures gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national security state that held the entire human world hostage.” As Oppenheimer pointed out, once gross overkill has been achieved, additional weapons don't improve security. The U.S. and USSR lived like two scorpions in a bottle - each capable of killing the other, but only at the cost of his own life.

Arsenals of Folly was reviewed by ASU Regents' Professor John Spence.