Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a riveting account of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. In the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the United States and the Soviet Union came within minutes of nuclear war, until Gorbachev boldly launched a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons, setting the stage for the 1986 Reykjavik summit and the incredible events that followed. In this thrilling, authoritative narrative, Richard Rhodes draws on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants and a wealth of new documentation to unravel the compelling, shocking story behind this monumental time in human history—its beginnings, its nearly chilling consequences, and its effects on global politics today.

This volume provides the first comprehensive history of the arms racing phenomenon in modern international politics, drawing both on theoretical approaches and on the latest historical research. Written by an international team of specialists, it is divided into four sections: before 1914; the inter-war years; the Cold War; and extra-European and post-Cold War arms races. Twelve case studies examine land and naval armaments before the First World War; air, land, and naval competition during the 1920s and 1930s; and nuclear as well as conventional weapons since 1945. Armaments policies are placed within the context of technological development, international politics and diplomacy, and social politics and economics. An extended general introduction and conclusion and introductions to each section provide coherence between the specialized chapters and draw out wider implications for policymakers and for political scientists. Arms Races in International Politics addresses two key questions: what causes arms races, and what is the connection between arms races and the outbreak of wars?

Martin McGuire has written for the specialist and the concerned layman a highly original and valuable contribution to our understanding of the arms race, based upon economic theory in general and the theory of economic duopoly in particular. He calls attention to the fact that when two world powers face each other with massive allocations of resources for arms, and when each regards the other as the major, if not the sole, threat to its own security, the question of accurate information about the strength and intentions of the adversary arises for each side in many and various ways. As a result, this study is a pioneering, analytic effort to approach the value of keeping secrets from or of obtaining information about an enemy. The author is concerned with such questions as: what is the loss in being only 50 percent confident rather than certain that the adversary doesn't have more X missiles or missiles of yield W megatons or of accuracy C thousand feet? Should one insist on being 95 percent sure when bargaining for arms control? How can a side compensate for its uncertainty most efficiently? An understanding of these problems can not only increase our security; it may help as well to contain or control the entire two-sided race.

The volume contains papers presented to the Eleventh Course of the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO) held in August 1986 at San Miniato, Italy. Attention was focused on the international aspects of arms control and disarmament.

In Freeze!, Henry Richard Maar III chronicles the rise of the transformative and transnational Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Amid an escalating Cold War that pitted the nuclear arsenal of the United States against that of the Soviet Union, the grassroots peace movement emerged sweeping the nation and uniting people around the world. The solution for the arms race that the Campaign proposed: a bilateral freeze on the building, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons on the part of two superpowers of the US and the USSR. That simple but powerful proposition stirred popular sentiment and provoked protest in the streets and on screen from New York City to London to Berlin. Movie stars and scholars, bishops and reverends, governors and congress members, and, ultimately, US President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev took a stand for or against the Freeze proposal. With the Reagan administration so openly discussing the prospect of winnable and survivable nuclear warfare like never before, the Freeze movement forcefully translated decades of private fears into public action. Drawing upon extensive archival research in recently declassified materials, Maar illuminates how the Freeze campaign demonstrated the power and importance of grassroots peace activism in all levels of society. The Freeze movement played an instrumental role in shaping public opinion and American politics, helping establish the conditions that would bring the Cold War to an end.

When most of us think about the potential of outer space for future generations, we think of world communications, satellite navigation, and scientific exploration. U.S. Space Command, however, thinks about weapons. Believing that conflict in space and wars fought from space are inevitable, the president has called on the agency to weaponize outer space and thus provoke an arms race that could cost the United States trillions of dollars and could lead to the demise of the human race. In War in Heaven, a Nobel Prize-nominated peace activist and a former U.S. foreign service officer (who helped write the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) look at the history of military uses of space and the current plans for "militarizing the heavens," including kinetic, laser, nuclear bombardment, and anti-satellite weapons. Contrary to the claims of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the United States faces a "space Pearl Harbor," Caldicott and Eisendrath show that the United States itself is today the principal obstruction to passage of an international treaty banning weapons from outer space. At a time when plans to build and deploy space weapons are on the administration's agenda but only just becoming known to the general public, this book will help launch a national discussion of a critical issue.

The Truman administration's decision to embark on an arms build-up in 1950 was a critical event. For the first time other than a World War, the United States became a global military presence. Unlike the World Wars, in this instance the deployment lasted decades, altering the nature of the Cold War and the United States' global role. Such a decision deserves a book dedicated to understanding the strategy and politics behind it. The Beginnings of the Cold War Arms Race serves that purpose. The Beginnings of the Cold War Arms Race reviews the state of American military affairs in the late 1940s and describes the role of atomic power in American strategy. It also outlines the factional fighting within the Truman administration over military spending and deployments and considers the Truman administration's perceptions of Soviet military power and intentions. The author presents a fascinating account of the strategy and politics behind the Truman administration's decision to engage in a massive arms build-up that initiated the Cold War arms race.

Innovation and the Arms Race investigates the causes and mechanisms of the "technological arms race" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Challenging the commonly held notion that Soviet weapons innovation processes simply mirror those of the United States, Matthew Evangelista shows that the United States usually leads in introducing new military technology, while the Soviets typically react to American initiatives. Evangelista bases his study of pivotal nuclear weapons development decisions on a variety of US and USSR primary sources, including the memoirs of weapons designers and scientists, declassified intelligence analyses, Soviet Academy of Science documents, and Nikita Khruschev's taped reminiscences. He finds that in the United States, impetus for innovation comes "from the bottom" at the initiative of corporate or government researchers and military officials, whereas the centralized Soviet system produces innovations "from the top" in response to foreign developments. A revelatory analysis of US military policy, Soviet-American relations, and weaponry development, Innovation and the Arms Race bears lessons for the study of great power competition and military innovation today.

This new edition of a very current interdisciplinary book covers both technical material and social issues, to give readers of all backgrounds a sense of the overall implications of the arms race. Weapons are the primary focus of the book, with the history of their development and nuclear politics included in the introductory chapters. There is a thorough discussion of global nuclear exchange, which considers the consequences of an all-out nuclear war, the psychological impact of the threat and actual nuclear war; the atomic bombings of Japan; and the biological effects of radiation from nuclear weapons.

The definitive guide to the history of nuclear arms control by a wise eavesdropper and masterful storyteller, Michael Krepon. The greatest unacknowledged diplomatic achievement of the Cold War was the absence of mushroom clouds. Deterrence alone was too dangerous to succeed; it needed arms control to prevent nuclear warfare. So, U.S. and Soviet leaders ventured into the unknown to devise guardrails for nuclear arms control and to treat the Bomb differently than other weapons. Against the odds, they succeeded. Nuclear weapons have not been used in warfare for three quarters of a century. This book is the first in-depth history of how the nuclear peace was won by complementing deterrence with reassurance, and then jeopardized by discarding arms control after the Cold War ended. Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace tells a remarkable story of high-wire acts of diplomacy, close calls, dogged persistence, and extraordinary success. Michael Krepon brings to life the pitched battles between arms controllers and advocates of nuclear deterrence, the ironic twists and unexpected outcomes from Truman to Trump. What began with a ban on atmospheric testing and a nonproliferation treaty reached its apogee with treaties that mandated deep cuts and corralled "loose nukes" after the Soviet Union imploded. After the Cold War ended, much of this diplomatic accomplishment was cast aside in favor of freedom of action. The nuclear peace is now imperiled by no less than four nuclear-armed rivalries. Arms control needs to be revived and reimagined for Russia and China to prevent nuclear warfare. New guardrails have to be erected. Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace is an engaging account of how the practice of arms control was built from scratch, how it was torn down, and how it can be rebuilt.