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Review — Arsenals of Folly, by Richard Rhodes

[Since I have a new book coming out I’m thinking about reviews lately. Here’s a rejected review, commissioned based on my book Fallout, for which I was paid a generous kill fee. I wrote it long ago, while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were still in office. It’s a great book, and though I wish it weren’t so, it’s still topical.]

From Russia, With…Pragmatism

“The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him. He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline. In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.”

The action in Ian Fleming’s fifth book about 007 opens in Russia and remains there for roughly its first third. Only when we reach the eleventh chapter (“The Soft Life”) do we see James Bond strangled by those blubbery arms, his spirit in decline, dying from peace.

Richard Rhodes’ latest book on nuclear weapons, Arsenals of Folly, also opens and remains in Russia for a long time and paints a similar picture of despair. And as with a good thriller, the apparent misdirection of initially focusing on the Chernobyl accident will make you wonder where he’s leading you. But just as readers from Kennedy to Reagan came to trust Ian Fleming to tie things together and deliver a thrilling and satisfying story, readers have come to trust Richard Rhodes to do the same when it comes to nuclear weapons. And he does.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb began with scientists at work, and Arsenals of Folly follows suit. That’s where the similarities end, though, as Rhodes quickly moves from the disaster at Chernobyl — as seen through the disillusioned eyes of physicist Stanislav Shushkevich — to a detailed examination of Mikhail Gorbachev’s background and rise to power. Gorbachev ascends amidst a corrupted leadership and dual-use economy, where virtually every industry has to service both military and civilians, and where when push comes to shove, guns trump butter.

And shove always came. Ignoring warnings from doves like Eisenhower (“You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”) and Churchill (“If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”), the fledgling U.S. neo-conservatives advising the executive branch promoted nuclear arms as useful deterrents and nuclear war as winnable. Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz all make early appearances. They and their agendas have been with us for decades, but were held somewhat in check by their presidential patrons; Nixon, Reagan, and the first Bush often ignored their advice. Cheney in particular is foiled by George H.W. Bush (via James Baker and Brent Scowcroft) in his efforts to undermine Gorbachev via his proposals for forcing regime change. Rhodes likens him to “the troll under the bridge, watching for billygoats,” and is clearly not a fan.

So as we move into the middle section of the book, the contrast with his previous books becomes particularly stark in that Rhodes shows us no great breakthroughs or discoveries in engineering or science, nor do we feel a sense of adventure, no matter how misguided. All we get is unenlightened self-interest and deception. And, though Rhodes’ subtitle at first seems a misnomer, when we reach this middle section he provides the appropriately depressing details of how the arms race was literally manufactured through the chicanery of the military-industrial complex players on both sides of the Bering Strait.

Rhodes makes the argument throughout that the Soviet Union wasn’t a real threat to the U.S. for technical reasons (even during Kennedy’s so-called missile gap the U.S. had better and more numerous weapons, and a greater capability to deliver them), and neither was a real threat to the other for practical reasons: neither side had a first strike policy, though each believed the other had.

So much for military intelligence, and the efficacy of real-life secret agents.

This section of the book closes with a chapter titled, “The Warheads Will Always Get Through,” which analyzes Ronald Reagan’s background and how it serves as a prelude to his meetings with Gorbachev. His evangelical fervor, his strong and unshakeable belief system, his willingness to ignore the science behind SDI, and his disinterest in details all imply a comparison to the current president Bush. However, Reagan’s genuine and visceral fear of nuclear weapons and their use provides for a sharp contrast with other presidents and Soviet leaders.

Rhodes does an excellent job of proving out Einstein’s quote “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking” in this middle section. After the heroic Gorbachev in the first part and the delusional policies and politics of the second, you’re primed and relieved to cheer on Reagan’s optimism and belief that the two leaders can put an end to the nuclear arms race.

So, the mood lifts in the eleventh chapter, which opens the third and final section of the book. Titled “Common Security,” it focuses on the negotiations between Reagan and Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War. Like many, including  John Arqilla in The Reagan Imprint (reviewed by Mark Williams in the May/June 2006 issue of MIT’s Technology Review), I thought of its conclusion as mainly a demonstration by Reagan that U.S. Visa cards had a higher credit limit than their Soviet counterparts. But while it was about the economy, by this point in the book Rhodes has already made the case that the change had been a long time coming, and Gorbachev was already looking for a way out of the game.

Even with all the details and nuances of arms negotiations offered here, the book gets simpler: Gorbachev and Reagan. Geneva and Reykjavik. Testing SDI in the laboratory or in space. Both leaders realizing, in the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

Reagan escaped these negotiations with his political life, despite the best pre-Geneva efforts of some of his advisors. (Though after Reykjavik, many changed their tune, at least temporarily.) George H.W. Bush did not, and neither did Gorbachev, an irony for Rhodes, who paints Gorbachev as heroic throughout; much more so than Reagan, calling SDI his “hubristic dream.” Further, according to Rhodes, Gorbachev was much more willing to share credit for ending the Cold War with the U.S. than Reagan or Bush, with the caveat that in sharing credit he also wanted the U.S. to share the blame for creating and promoting it.

Rhodes puts forth a convincing argument that Chernobyl is a pivotal event in all of this, and one of Gorbachev’s few failures in implementing the openness in public discussion about current and historical problems that characterized glasnost. In the process of canonizing Gorbachev, readers carried along by the narrative might forget the extent of the cover-up of this accident. But in the end, Chernobyl is Chekhov’s Gun, placed in the hands of Stanislav Shushkevich. Now president of Belarus, the man who lost faith in Gorbachev because of the way he handled the dissemination of information about Chernobyl becomes the one to deliver the news to Gorbachev that he, along with Leonid Kravchuk (president of Ukraine) and Boris Yeltsin have agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union. He does this only after Yeltsin has already told George H.W. Bush the news of Gorbachev’s ouster.

Fleming’s From Russia With Love ends with an unconscious Bond crashing to the floor, his triumph compromised by a last minute (though of course temporary) victory for the Soviet spy organization SMERSH. Rhodes ends his book by painting the end of the Cold War as an equally compromised victory, accusing the U.S. of “obstinately misreading the failure of our authoritarian counterpart on the other side of the world, to our shame and misfortune…”

It’s an emotional way to close, but appropriate. Facts and figures aren’t the point of this book.
On page 242, Rhodes explains Gorbachev’s and Reagan’s incorrect recollections of their first meeting at Reykjavik by noting that “[f]actual memory is more fallible than emotional memory.” I think the same will be true for readers of Arsenals of Folly; it certainly was for me. The book is dense with both fact and emotion, and in the end it’s the emotions that stick. (One of the few facts that stuck appeared near the end, where Rhodes quotes Carl Sagan’s calculation that the Cold War cost the U.S. $10 trillion–enough to buy everything we collectively own except for the land itself.) Bewilderment during the opening section, depression throughout the middle as both sides engage in “threat inflation”, and hope tinged with amazement and despair in conclusion. That’s what Rhodes makes us feel.

This is the third important book on nuclear weapons Rhodes has written in as many decades. I hope the one in the 2010s can be his last — not because he’s done writing, but because the problem is solved. Given that some of the bit part villains in Arsenals of Folly later found starring roles in the U.S. government, I look forward to Rhodes’ next book, but we may have to look to fiction for the safer world it deserves.

Meeting Billy Collins

We met our favorite poet twice last weekend,
the second time in captivity,
the first time in the wild.

Up on the porch,
in the rocking chair,
he probably sought solitude and calm before blustering adulation, but we two fans,
opportunistic predators,
had other things in mind.

“Is that?” and “Should we?” gave way
to stepping off the sidewalk, looking up, feigning ignorance,
and asking was the bed nice, the breakfast tasty, and would he recommend this B & B?

They were and he would, though he’d only been there two days and was leaving tonight. That’s when we came clean.

“We thought we recognized you, and now hearing your voice…
we look forward to seeing you at the reading.”

He said yes, he would rock here a bit longer, then go rock the joint.

Upon entering the joint we switched roles.
When he finished rocking it we lined up along with the rest of his prey,
books and hats in hand,
hungry for a few more moments.

Our turn came and we came cleaner.
“So, we actually knew it was…” but didn’t get any further, because Billy Collins interrupted,
the top predator’s prerogative,
telling us with a sharp-toothed smile “Yeah, I clocked you before that. You can’t get away with that bullshit.”

It had been bullshit, but our favorite poet was wrong.
We got away with it.

[This didn’t happen last weekend, but had when I wrote the first draft of this. He’s our favorite poet, and maybe he could become one of yours as well. I particularly recommend The Lanyard, The Trouble with Poetry, Litany, and a couple on dogs. I also wrote another tribute to him, in a rough approximation of his style, a few years ago. It’s about salad.]

He really is that tall: meeting Lyle Lovett, once, for a second

Since he has a new album out today, the first in ten years, here’s a Lyle Lovett memory:

My first full-time professional career was as a consulting nuclear engineer. Kind of like Sherlock Holmes’ “consulting detective”, maybe, but practiced in places where they’d only put nuke plants. So when, during the job interview, the company asked if I was open to travel I should have figured that they weren’t going to send me to London or Tokyo or some other cool city.

Anyway, when I wasn’t living in an extended stay hotel room out in the middle of nowhere I lived in Philadelphia, but I didn’t like it there either. It is a cool city, but it turns out I like living near big cities, not in ’em. I’m currently not far from Detroit, and can get to Toronto or Chicago in a few hours, and that’s how I like it.

One of the fine things about Philadelphia was the music scene. I saw performers ranging from the Indigo Girls (not so great live, at least on that tour) to John Lee Hooker (so so great live). I’m not sure I’d even recognize this version of me now, but record hunting on South Street was a thing I actually did many Friday nights.

And the radio was terrific. WHYY, home of Fresh Air, for news and WXPN for music. Around 1990, towards the end of my time there, the latter did the unthinkable for a college station and hired a professional morning host named Michaela Majoun. Professional, as in she showed up on time and didn’t leave your clock radio to serve up absolute dead air when the alarm went off so you didn’t wake up in time for work, an experience I had with previous college stations…looking at you WCBN in Ann Arbor. (Yes, I hold a grudge.)

I had an invisible crush on her. Or at least her taste in music, and between her and Terry Gross she locked me in as a public radio listener. So much so that I started sending money in to pledge drives. And at some point, I decided I should volunteer to help take those pledges, so one morning in the spring of 1990, I think, I got up even before her show began and stumbled over to Penn’s campus to answer a land-line and eat stale bagels and glance over to the broadcast booth when it was quiet to see the magic happen.

It was fun, but Ms. Majoun didn’t have much time to hang out, meaning her good taste wasn’t going to literally rub off on me. So when my shift was over and I had to head for the door and the day job, I got a wave and a mouthed “thank you,” which was cool.

On the way out I stopped for a drink of water, and with head down, out of the corner of my eye I saw that the person waiting to get a drink after me was wearing a truly fine pair of cowboy boots. I wore a truly utilitarian pair of cowboy boots when I was on site at the nuke plant — they were quite comfortable for a full day on my feet, it turns out. So I appreciated ’em, and as I lifted my head from drinking I was about to compliment the owner when I realized I had to keep looking up. And up. And then up some more. When I reached Lyle Lovett’s eyes I realized I had to keep looking even further if I wanted to see all the hair, but I stopped myself from doing that, stuttered out “I really like your new album,” and he gave that crooked smile he has and out of the corner of his mouth he drawled “Well, thank ya verruh much.” and maybe we shook hands, but I don’t remember anything more than that the encounter carried me through the rest of the day.

Through to now, in fact.

There’s no point to this story, I guess, but there is a take-away: go listen to “If I Had a Boat” now and read your copy of “Becoming Duchess Goldblatt” tonight (trust me) and wake up to your local public radio station tomorrow and discover something new and cool.

The (First) Year of the Dog

After wanting to have a dog in my life basically all of my life, it finally happened a year ago today. That’s when we had Bella in for an sleepover, in part to find out whether she and Pepper (our cat) would get along…or at least tolerate each other. That went fine, and when the next day arrived we decided to tell the person we adopted her from that unless they objected, it might be less confusing if she just stayed.

In for a penny, in for 35 pounds.

Everyone shed some tears that day — she’d been well-loved at her previous home, but circumstances had changed there and she needed a new place. So we abandoned our original plan, which was to wait a while longer and then adopt an older, non-shedding breed/mix. What we ended up with is an energetic** three year old Australian Cattle Dog, Golden Retriever, Miniature American Shepherd, Pomeranian, Beagle, Portuguese Podengo Pequeno, etcetera etcetera mix. Yeah, we did the DNA test thing, and they may as well have just returned a verdict of “Breed: Dog.” She has all the fur colors you could ever want to find, and we do find them everywhere, so I’m sure at this point our respective microbiomes are all well integrated too.

She’s not perfect — Bella had spent almost no time on a leash until she moved in with us, and that coupled with a very strong “OMG I SMELL RABBITS DON’T YOU SMELL RABBITS LET’S GO GET ALL THE RABBITS!” attitude makes her a challenge on walks. And though I can get them both to eat treats out of the same hand at the same time without any fuss, she’s too jealous of attention given to Pepper. There are other non-ideal aspects, but most are in the “Hey, dogs are gonna act like dogs, so whaddaya gonna do?” category.

(For instance, there are days when we feel like we’re on the wrong side of the window in Patrick McDonnell’s “Mutts”.)

All that aside, we think her life is better here, but she loves to be loved so Bella probably would have done fine anywhere. She sure has made our lives better, though, so here’s to you sharing the same happiness we feel (and that she feels) when we see her run or flop over or meet a new friend. And every new person’s a friend.

 

** Energetic is okay! Bella arrived just as my human running partner needed an extended time off to heal up from some injuries. So in this first year she and I logged 74 runs for 339.6 miles together. It would have been more except we didn’t run together for the first two months: she was a country dog and her feet needed to get used to sidewalks and roads.

In those 74 runs I’ve tired her out exactly zero times.

E.O. Wilson: 1929-2021

 

It seems, to me anyway, like I should have something to say about E.O. Wilson.

I worked with him to adapt his memoir Naturalist into comics, but we weren’t close collaborators. He already knew our editor Rebecca, he saw Chris’ art samples, he read my outline and some sample script pages and he trusted we’d do a good job.

We did spend time on the phone together when I finished the script, and then again when Chris’ pencil art were complete. He made suggestions (many of which were factual corrections of the “That person had a mustache at the time.” variety, some of which were of the “Oh wow. Yeah, of course I should have done it that way!” variety), and then he once again stepped away. That was gratifying, in that a person who could have easily asserted his ego and stature to make our job harder simply didn’t. I think he was secure in the knowledge that his book was both superb on its own, and could become good comics. I hope it’s not just my own ego talking when I say that I think it did.

One of the biggest challenges, and the thing I’m most proud of, is the way we ended the graphic novel. His original book had, as I recall, three good places to end, but for our adaptation we didn’t have the space to include everything. (We used less than 1/4 of the words from his original, and even with over 1200 panels-worth of picture we couldn’t show everything.) So I had to pick one, and I didn’t pick the same last lines as his original text. I didn’t even pick the last lines of a paragraph.

This made me nervous. A self-taught comics writer like me doesn’t feel qualified to edit a world famous scientist with two Pulitzer Prizes.

But my experience with Ray Bradbury had prepared me to do this, and conversations with my friend and collaborator Leland Myrick did too.

You can read my Ray Bradbury story here, and I can summarize what Leland taught me more succinctly: sometimes you have to think of comics as poetry. Efficiency and precision in your choice of inked line can produce the same effect as a poem’s concise yet expansive choice of words.

I’m not going to tell you what I landed on for the closing scene, and last line of this new look at E.O. Wilson’s life, but I’m proud of what we did, and grateful that Professor Wilson (he said I could call him Ed, but…) recognized that sometimes the best ending doesn’t always appear on the last page, and that inspiration can speak softly.

Anyway, I’ve told the story above before, since it’s the memory of working with him that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

The whole experience was fun. No fancier word needed.

So, Professor Wilson. I wish I could have met you in person. There, at least, I think I’d have been able to muster the courage to say this, this way:

Thank you, Ed.

Can you make money doing comics, or, d’esprit de l’escalier…

As I await some new contracts, a question about one’s best ad-libbed line** came up on Facebook the other day, and I realized I actually had one! So, here it is:

A few years ago I gave a talk about comics to a group of wealthy alumni of the university where I work. This happened down in Florida, where these alums — a.k.a. prospective donors — are contractually obligated to live during the winter.

Most of the speakers are professors, there to make the audience proud of the cool research done up here in Michigan. I think I was there to provide something lighter, along the lines of “Look, isn’t it amazing how a librarian can do interesting things too?”

So I talked about comics in general and Primates in particular, and it went well enough that I let my guard down during the Q&A. That’s where one of the snowbirds rich enough to speak without filters asked, in an incredulous voice, “Do you make any money at this?”

Without wasting any time thinking it through, I said “Usually only middle-schoolers ask how much I get paid for writing, but how about this. I’ll show you my tax returns if you’ll show me yours.”

The shockwave generated by the development officers’ group cringe at the back of the room measured about a 7 on the Richter scale, but fortunately the audience burst out laughing and everybody left happy. And I still get paid for both writing and librarianing.

 

 

**As opposed to those times when you only think of what you should have said much later, e.g. when you’re heading downstairs and out of the building, per the French phrase d’esprit de l’escalier, or “wit of the staircase.”

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