Arsenals of folly
The story of the postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade. Drawing on a wealth of new documentation, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s led Soviet leader Andropov to conclude that Reagan must be preparing for a nuclear war. In 1983, when NATO staged a larger than usual series of field exercises, the Soviet military came very close to launching a defensive first strike. Then Reagan launched the arms-reduction campaign of his second presidential term and set the stage for his 1986 summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives, demonstrating how the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation, which the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify current 'war on terror' and the disastrous invasion of Iraq, were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before.--From publisher description.
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- "Arsenals of Folly" By Richard Rhodes is one of the best records of the Gorbachev era with respect to negotiations over arms reductions with Reagan (which resulted in a highly fractured US administration, with opponents (Cheney etc.) fighting advocates (Shultz etc.) over what policy Reagan should support), the immense effect of the Chernobyl disaster on the Soviet Union (something many nuclear energy proponents still try to downplay), and a few other aspects of Gorbachev's years in power in the USSR.
The culmination of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika was the Fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the more memorable historical moments of the 20th century and one which gave a lot of hope to young people who grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. If you watched "The Day After Tomorrow" on American television in the 1980s, you might know the feeling.
However, in retrospect that was a high point in terms of hopes for peace and prosperity. The Soviet Union went rapidly from communist authoritarian to oligarch kleptocracy during the Yeltsin era, and NATO wasn't disbanded like the Warsaw Pact was but instead started bombing Europe (Yugoslavia), and the steady downhill progression has continued ever since. Putin threw out or jailed the oligarchs Washington preferred by 2005 or so, and since then it's been a steady return to full on Cold War proxy wars and gas and oil pipeline control conflicts (Georgia, Syria, Azerbaijan, Ukraine) stretching from the Middle East to Northern Europe.
It's ridiculous that after all those peace efforts in the late 1980s, we're back to early 1980s levels of nuclear tension. As far as who to blame, there's plenty to go around - oil corporations wanting more profits, arms dealers wanting more wars, authoritarians wanting more power, empires wanting more control of resources, etc.
- Richard Rhodes book "The Arsenals of Folly" covers the lead up to the fall of the Soviet Union from the perspective of the leaders negotiating to reduce levels of nuclear weapons. It also covers some of the fundamental economic problems the Soviets had:
http://www.amazon.com/Arsenals-Folly-Making-Nuclear-Vintage/...
- It's the secondary effects that would likely cause this. Having read a good deal about the Chernobyl (Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly) and Fukushima disasters, basically it's the loss of coolant in the reactor cores and the evaporation of water from the cooling ponds for the 'spent' (i.e. too hot to handle) reactor fuel that lead to a runaway meltdown event and associated fire.
So, a 500kt blast over a reactor site will destroy all the surrounding infrastructure, evaporate the water from the cooling ponds, and while perhaps the steel reactor containment shell itself might not be completely obliterated/vaporized at once (or it might), the whole zone is going to be unapproachable, and the kind of heroic efforts employed at Chernobyl (notably a graphite core reactor that burned, Fukushima having no flammable graphite) and Fukushima are not going to happen. So, total meltdown of reactor core, hydrogen explosion, venting to atmosphere, some fraction of the core liquifies the rest vaporizes. The spent fuel in the ponds, all the water flashes to steam, they burn / melt. Nobody comes rushing in to manage the situation, it's full-on runaway.
So Chernobyl IIRC lost about 1% of one of its reactor mass to the atmosphere, and that was one of four reactors at the site. This resulted in significant fallout across Europe and a 30-km radius long-term exclusion zone. Now let's say instead oh, at least 50% of each reactor mass + spent fuel goes into the atmosphere, the rest melts into the ground... I don't know how this would scale. A 300-km radius exclusion zone perhaps at minimum? To get accurate estimates you then have to do a bunch of modeling, atmospheric fluid dynamics, etc.
I can't imagine there aren't top-secret studies in some military branch or other on how this would all pan out, but they've never been publicly released to my knowledge.
- Richard Rhodes writes about these subject in 'The Making of Hydrogen Bomb' and 'Arsenals of Folly', but I wouldn't summarize it the way you did...
- Richard Rhodes had a particular axe to grind. I would suggest looking at Atcheson and primary sources before Rhodes. You are also mixing titles - Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun and Arsenals of Folly.
Making of the Atomic Bomb is amazing... but also bone chilling when you realize that scientists were basically advocating a dictatorship of technocrats.
- "He was going to start a new world war"
He almost did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
However, to his credit he learned from this mistake and decided to take a less confrontational line with the Soviets - a change that he deserves a lot of credit for.
Edit: See "Arsenals of Folly" by Richard Rhodes.
