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History of Folly

I'm a big fan of Richard Rhodes. I thought Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb was an absorbing, fast-paced book, a tough trick to manage when you're detailing atomic physics and its political ramifications. And his first book on matters nuclear, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Rhodes' latest, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, isn't nearly as good as his earlier works. The topic seems evident from the title: It's a history of the arms race. And that's right, a bit, but the book also seems to be about Rhodes' apparent hate-on for Richard Perle.

There's nothing wrong with having a hate-on for Richard Perle. Given his role in some of the most aggressive moves America has made over the last two or three decades, having a hate-on for Perle probably is a rational response to historical fact. However, Rhodes' lets his anger get in the way of what could have been a fascinating story.

Arsenals of Folly starts out pretending to be a good book about the last 50 years of the 20th century, when policy makers on both sides of the Cold War decided it would be a good idea to spend trillions of dollars to make enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world. Then they decided to spend many more trillions of dollars making even more nuclear weapons. And then, as though they hadn't already made the Cold War dangerous enough, they started doing insane things like invading Afghanistan (the Soviets) and conducting threatening military training exercises (the Americans, which likely played a part in a Soviet jet shooting down an off-course passenger airliner in September 1983, killing 269 people).

My first indication Rhodes' book had serious problems was his' reliance on Gail Sheehy's Gorbachev biography, The Man Who Changed The World. Not many great books about Gorbachev have been written. Sheehy's biography, however, is down at the bottom of the pile. It is full of the sort of biases that dominated American perceptions of Moscow during the Cold War. And since it was published in 1990, seventeen years ago, it is brutally out of date. Rhodes should have quoted from the umpteen later books written by Gorbachev's firsthand associates, or the wealth of academic literature. In other ways, particularly when he's writing about Soviet politics, Rhodes's prose feels tentative and inexpert, as though he's strayed out of his comfort zone.

But Rhodes' book commits a worse sin: It is boring in a way that his previous two atomic histories were not. For example, when it comes to the most important meetings, the Gorbachev-Reagan battles that saw the two world leaders negotiate the end of the Cold War, Rhodes relies on archival sources taken by eyewitness note-takers. That's a good thing, usually, unless you just transcribe them into your book, as Rhodes seems to have done.

This is particularly evident as Rhodes recounts the Oct. 10-12, 1986, meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan at Reykjavik, Iceland. There is some great stuff in here, such as the fact that, because of space restrictions, the American negotiators took to meeting in a bathroom in the building that housed the summit. Reagan sat on the toilet while his aides debated over the fate of the world's nuclear arsenal. Others sat in the bathtub. Unfortunately, Rhodes doesn't edit these accounts to the extent that he should have. The reader doesn't need to know every piece of dialogue that Reagan said to Gorbachev. Give me the gist of it, keep the story going so that you still have my attention for the important stuff.

Around the time that Rhodes gets to the Reykjavik summit, what the book actually is about becomes clear. Rhodes is really mad about the second Iraqi war. And he really wants people to know that many of the same neo-cons responsible for the arms buildup of the early '80s also were responsible for the second Iraqi war. We're talking the usual suspects -- Richard Perle, Dick Cheney. And OK, we get it, the guys used bias in their reasoning. They were blind to the facts in the '80s, and they were blind to the facts in the post-9/11 rush to get into Iraq.

Rhodes is so busy trying to indict Cheney and Perle that he forgets about his history and the whole book wanders into the territory of an anti-neo-con essay -- a wholesale statement against war, nuclear or otherwise. "Fear was part of the program, the psychological response to threat inflation that delivered reliable votes," Rhodes writes on p. 298, toward the book's end. "How did we come to such a pass? I was raised to believe that Americans were a courageous people. Weren't you?"

This sort of editorializing isn't Rhodes's strength. It feels shrill. It feels obtrusive. And it feels trite. (Naomi Klein makes a similar point in her latest book, The Shock Doctrine. And Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter argued along similar lines way back in 1964, with his seminal essay, The Paranoid Style In American Politics.)

Rhodes is so angry about Perle, Cheney et. al. that he has lost his objectivity -- which is what seems to have troubled Rhodes about his enemies in the first place.

Political Plaques and Bureaucrats

Early in the research for my book I met with Leon Aron, the Yeltsin biographer, in his office at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. I went in a little intimidated—Aron's a pretty big name. I'd heard he was working on a Yakovlev biography. If he was, it would be a big setback for my own book about Yakovlev.

It turned out I had nothing to worry about. Aron wasn't planning his own book. His enthusiasm for all things Yakovlev immediately set me at ease, and the two of us embarked on a long conversation about what an amazing tale Yakovlev’s biography made. Soon we were discussing the historic conversation Yakovlev and Gorbachev had in 1983 in a backyard in Essex County, Ontario—where, just before a dinner party at the home of Canada’s then-agriculture minister, Eugene Whelan, the two Russians first discussed the reforms that would become perestroika.

“Do Canadians know about that conversation?” Aron asked me. “Do they know how historic that moment was? Is there a plaque there, or something?”

No, I said. No plaque. Not only that -- most people didn't even know it happened.

“There should be a historical marker,” Aron said. “A plaque. There should be a plaque.”

He’s right. A year or so later, I’ve finished the book and handed in a Walrus feature I’ve had simmering since the summer (it'll be out in early June). In a rare bit of spare time I’ve begun researching the stimulating topic of historical plaques. I made a round of calls last week, and then this week received a call back from exactly the right person at the Ontario Heritage Trust, the provincial agency that manages the plaque program. A staff historian described a ceremony that was just about exactly what I hoped to do for Yakovlev-–erecting a plaque, staging an unveiling with local dignitaries and politicians, complete with historians describing the greater historical significance of the events depicted in the plaque.

The Heritage staffer did describe a few obstacles I’m going to have to figure out how to solve. There are two locations that would be suitable for Yakovlev-related plaques. The first is just across from Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park, at the former Soviet ambassador’s residency. However, the residency now houses the Russian ambassador, and I wonder whether the Russian foreign service under the Putin/Medvedev autocracy would be enthusiastic about allowing a plaque on their grounds that honours an enthusiastic democrat like Yakovlev.

The other location that would be perfect for a historical marker is Whelan's home. This is the spot that I mentioned to the Heritage staffer. She worried the incident might not fit the mandate of the Ontario Heritage Program – apparently the incident needs to affect the history of the province, and they interpret that quite strictly. I think I can swing it, still – the Yakovlev-Gorbachev conversation led to the end of the Cold War, which made the whole world safer, including the province of Ontario. That'll be my argument, anyway.

Lastly, the staffer also suggested pursuing the Canada-wide historical plaques program administered by Parks Canada. I think I’ll pursue both of them — kind of a two-track policy of plaque procurement. The deadline for the Ontario plaques program happens in September. There’s also a funding element to the process; apparently, the Ontario Heritage Trust is more likely to grant the plaque request if you can donate some money to defray the costs. I may start some sort of funding drive here. And if anyone knows any way to fast-track this process, please e-mail me. If the province can erect the plaque pictured above, for a guy whose sum total of Ontario-relevance appears to be that he once went for a walk across the Bruce Peninsula, then I should be able to get something going for a guy who helped to end the Cold War.

Don't Write Off Russia's New President

One aspect of Tuesday's Democratic debate that few people noticed was the trouble both Clinton and Obama had naming Russia's incoming president, who will be confirmed in an "election" this Sunday. There are a number of reasons for this; Obama is seen as weak on all things foreign, and while Clinton does have some interesting ideas on Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia's presidential changeover hasn't attracted much attention from the American electorate.

Western media coverage on the Russian election has been almost unrelentingly negative. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and our own Globe and Mail have all painted affairs there pretty bleakly. Reporters quote mostly anonymous sources describing the way Putin has stomped on democracy--factory managers monitoring their employees' voting, under threat of firing, and school children being assigned to report how their parents voted. Western media have fallen all over themselves to depict this as backsliding toward the Cold War era when Russia was controlled by the all-powerful Communist Party.

And yeah, all this is pretty egregious. But also reeking of the Cold War is Western media's coverage of Russian affairs. The attention has been unrelentingly negative. English media such as The Guardian at least have an excuse—Russia and England are still bickering over fallout from the Litvinenko affair. Still, the negativity seems so strident it verges on propaganda. This rush to condemn Russia would benefit from some nuance. (The exception to this rule has been CBC Radio, which featured some great context on Wednesday morning from the Russian-born York University academic, Sergei Plekhanov.)

Obama and Clinton had trouble naming Russia's next president because he is seen as irrelevant -- because it's thought that Putin and his ex-KGB cronies will retain their iron grip on Russian affairs. The name of the next Russian president is Dmitri Medvedev, of course. Very few Western pundits have bothered to point out that Medvedev stands to represent real change for Russia.

Discounting the short reigns of Andropov and Chernenko in the '80s, every Russian leader since Lenin has been underestimated by those around him. After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev was thought to be only a doorstop holding open the corridor to the leadership while more powerful competitors like Beria and Malenkov sorted out the succession. Likewise, Khrushchev's successor in 1964, Brezhnev, was dismissed as a buffoon whose opinion was so easily spun by his peers that he was nicknamed "the Ballerina." But Khruschev dispatched with his enemies and went on to rule for 11 years. Brezhnev bested that -- he ruled for 18.

Time and time again in Russia, the newcomer is thought to be a weakling, an inconsequential figurehead. Then, once he's officially assumed the leadership, the Kremlin's power brokers reorganize themselves into new factions. The smart ones align themselves with the new guy, who, with their help, gradually begins exerting his increasing influence. And eventually, the new guy, the figurehead, no longer looks so inconsequential.

The same thing will happen with Medvedev. This is good for the West, where, despite most media ignoring such signs, Medvedev has been indicating plans to open up the Russian economy. He's also signaled his intention to push Russia toward genuine democracy. This will happen gradually, but I'm betting it'll happen all the same. One thing is certain -- a year from now, American politicians will know Medvedev's name.