Closing Pandora's Box: Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War.

• Author: Blacker, Coit D.

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Closing Pandora's Box: Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War. Patrick Glynn. Basic, $30. However flawed the final product--and flawed it is-- we are indebted to Patrick Glynn for writing a book about the arms races and arms control that is serious, lively, and literate. Unlike so many of his ideological brethren who have felt the need to unburden themselves on these contentious, if now slightly pass6, subjects, Glynn has taken the time and energy to develop an argument that is internally consistent and grounded in a close and, for the most part, accurate reading of history. One need not agree with more than a fraction of Glynn's pronouncements and conclusions to recognize that Closing Pandora's Box is the product of an able and subtle mind.

Glynn, an arms control official during the Reagan years, wants us to understand the process by which Western political leaden--particularly U.S. presidents from Truman to Carter ---came to devote enormous effort to the pursuit of agreements aimed at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and how poor the results have been. He sketches out and then counterposes what he regards as the two overarching tendencies in postwar American foreign policy. On the one hand, Glynn discusses what we might call "the urge to disarm," which he attributes to war-weariness in the aftermath of World War II and Korea. This urge, rooted in a misguided belief that we can attain universal peace, results from mushy-headed thinking by well-meaning but naive political leaders. On the other hand, there is "the urge to resist"--by force of arms if necessary--the dangerous and imperial designs of the Soviet Union and its communist allies.

The preoccupation with arms control, Glynn alleges, owes much to the first of these schools, which is in keeping with what he terms the longdominant "liberal-pacifist" tradition in Western politics, a tradition that initially placed the pursuit of peace and later the pursuit of "strategic stability" before the more mundane but essential search for national security. According to Glynn, all U.S. administrations between 1945 and 1980 succumbed to some degree to the false promise of arms control and were repeatedly victimized by the chimera of negotiations with the "evil empire." The more appropriate response, it seems, would have been to augment U.S. and Western military capabilities at every turn and to face down the Soviets at every opportunity.

Only the restoration of...