Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes [Rhodes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Cold War, History, Military, Nuclear Warfare, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, United States, Weapons & Warfare
ISBN: 9780307267863
Google: corDMrurk9sC
Amazon: B000W93DEO
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2007-10-09T03:00:00+00:00

Security can now only be achieved in common. No longer against each other but only with each other shall we be secure.

EGON BAHR

ELEVEN GOING AROUND IN CIRCLES

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV AND RONALD REAGAN MET for the first time on 19 November 1985, a cold, gray Tuesday, near Geneva, the substantial Swiss guildhall of international diplomacy mortared around the lower end of Western Europe’s largest lake. The United States had rented the Château Fleur d’Eau on the western shore of Lake Leman for the summit meeting; Reagan, the host of the first morning’s tête-à-tête, thrilled his staff by emerging hatless and coatless from the château’s glassed-in atrium as the Soviet limousines arrived and bounding down the steps to greet a Gorbachev carefully bundled against the cold. The trivial upstaging had been the last-minute inspiration of a White House advance man, but such was the freight of public attention to the first U.S.-Soviet summit in more than six years—some thirty-five hundred journalists had been granted credentials to read the tea leaves—that Gorbachev needled Reagan thereafter at the end of each session, “The next time we meet, will it be coats on or coats off?”

Leaders who make history are often provincials: Provincials attempt what sophisticates consider naïve. The two current candidates for world leadership were both country boys, a state park lifeguard and a champion harvester, each an outsider to the inner elites of the government he headed, each in his own way an idealist determined to push beyond the status quo. Reagan had been tailored in Hollywood, but the sophistries of Washington’s nuclear mandarins had failed to complicate his apocalyptic Dixon, Illinois, worldview. Gorbachev’s southern Russian accent and hillbilly grammar offended the ears of the suave Moscow bureaucracy he outmanipulated a dozen times on any ordinary day.

Their handlers had scheduled only fifteen minutes for their first morning meeting, the two of them alone with their translators. They took an hour. The official photographers left, the doors closed, the general secretary said they could really talk now, and the president held forth. Both he and Gorbachev had come from similarly modest beginnings, he said, and now the two of them held the fate of the world in their hands. Their countries were superpowers, the only countries that could start World War III but also the only countries that could bring peace to the world. They would talk about many things in the plenary sessions to come; perhaps now, at the beginning, they should try to eliminate their suspicions of each other. And then a Reagan truism, repeated in speeches and private conversations for decades: Countries don’t mistrust each other because of armaments; they build up their armaments because they mistrust each other. (While his aides believed the maxim was a Reagan coinage, he had in fact borrowed it without attribution from the writings of the Spanish historian and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, who had headed the League of Nations disarmament section for six years in the 1930s and written a bittersweet memoir about the experience—although

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