Panic Attack
When I first arrived in the Soviet Union in 1987, I suffered from that sinking feeling brought on by the dismal clutter of the Soviet landscape. I walked beaches littered with washed-up machine parts, rode tattered trams past shabby housing blocks, and tripped over rebar in concrete-clad playgrounds. I left the Soviet Union and spent the next six months in the orderly affluence of Western Europe and then returned home to the United States. Home at last. Riding the train between New York and Washington, however, I had an uncanny sensation of return. The speeding train rushed past Trenton, Philadelphia and Baltimore revealing a series of unseemly tableaux vivants: overturned grocery carts mounting rusted cars, garbage strewn like lingerie outside shuttered factories, whole cities of abandoned row houses, bedding expelled. How had I missed it? My American landscape looked so Soviet.
Richard Rhodes’ account of the “folly” of the reckless American and Soviet nuclear arms race narrates the great, shared tragedy that befell both the Soviet Union and the United States in the second half of the 20th century. While Europe quietly rebuilt from the shards of war, stockpiling good will and prosperity in the form of public housing and health care, high-quality schools, public transportation and a well-maintained infrastructure, the United States and the Soviet Union were furiously burying their public wealth under the ocean, in desert locations and deep inside hollowed-out mountains, where military strategists hoarded tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. This was public wealth that would do no one, except for the arms dealers and threat-inflating political operatives, any good. Rhodes points out that no nation in human history has ever so wantonly spent “a waste of treasure” to secure not peace, not even security, but a persistent and carefully husbanded fear.
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Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 10:01 am under