Richard Rhodes on the War Scare, Neocon’s and Threat Inflation

The Style section of the Washington Post features Bob Thompon’s profile of author Richard Rhodes. His just published Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, gives an account of the 1983 war scare - the incident precipitated by exercise Able Archer 83 that might have led to a nuclear war. Rhodes apparently thinks the incident to be more important that did Melvin Leffler in his lecture at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Leffler saw it as important, but not a turning point.

The Tompson profile also links the Neoconservative's Reagan era “threat inflation” to the current war in Iraq. (As a civilian analyst of Soviet Weapons Programs, who served through 1996, I felt that the whole neocon “Team B” approach was better described as “threat exaggeration.’) Based on this profile, and the Amazon review – I haven’t yet read the book – Rhodes connects this threat inflation to the justification for the war in Iraq. While the neocon’s and their approach certainly played a role, there were both good reasons and analytical errors that led to overstating the WMD threat in Iraq. My own view is that the administration, under fear of another 9/11 overstated the threat, and (deliberately?) ignored evidence that would have dissuaded them, or at least led them to fight the war differently.