Igor Ljubuncic's Reviews > Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation

Solid 4.5 stars. A bit academic sometimes, but overall a fresh and compelling read.

In a way, this book gives a wider overview of the conditions that led to the Able Archer 83 confrontation between the US/NATO and USSR, as I've written in my review of 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink several weeks ago.

Rodric gives an indepth analysis of the social, political, cultural, and scientific backgrounds that had driven the nuclear powers in the Cold War, and the unanswerable question of MAD. I really liked the first third, as it sheds a lot of light on the scientific breakthroughs and the respective communities that had developed the nuclear weapons on the two sides of the world. A fascinating read, especially how whimsical, eccentric and naive some of these academic minds were.

The middle section is mostly military thinking and doctrine - five decades of not being to formulate the answer to how one uses the nukes. Then, the last part focuses on the political games, including the Cuban Crisis, Able Archer, and some other incidents, none of which had mercifully evolved into war.

There's no happy ending - only uncertainty about the future. But on the positive side, none of the doomsday predictions conceived in the past 60-70 years had come to pass, so that's some solace for the future generations.

The one thing missing, I think, is the French side. Because the French had their own, independent military industry and did a lot of things on their own, unlike the British, which often relied heavily on the US. The French story is quite interesting, including their own interpretation of MAD, their own nuclear patrols with Mirage IV, and so forth.

Overall, I liked the book. It's a bit scattered sometimes, and there's some self-argument, which feels like an academic essay, but all in all, the author does drive a consistent theme, and does lead to a conclusion, and it's not an easy task encompassing half a century of political bickering into a coherent work - especially since the military minds and the leaders on both sides rarely had a coherent, consistent view of their own motives and actions - as well as of those on the opposite side.

On a completely different note ...

If anything, if there's one argument against AI taking critical roles in society, it is this. We had 70 years of mishaps, accidents, posturing, false alarms, fear, confusion, badly designed systems, and paranoia wrapped in some 70,000 warheads. And yet, we survived, exactly because of the imperfection of the human condition. Machines would have made a decision a long time ago, and this review would never have been written. Food for thought.

Quite recommended.

Igor