![]() ![]() The disturbing lesson of Rhodes’ latest volume is that the keepers of those fearsome arsenals didn’t know what they were doing, said Gregg Herken in The Boston Globe. An overnight holocaust, writes Rhodes, was narrowly averted. ![]() war game as cover for a nuclear first strike. In November 1983, Soviet intelligence officials were so spooked by President Ronald Reagan’s belligerent rhetoric and unprecedented military spending that they mistakenly interpreted a routine U.S. But that idea is laughable, says Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Rhodes. “Mutual assured destruction” was supposed to guarantee caution. At the peak of the arms race, those two superpowers possessed 65,000. Kennedy once estimated that just 50 thermonuclear bombs, strategically aimed, would utterly destroy either American or Soviet society. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |