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.

This is not the first time Rhodes has visited this topic. In 1996 he won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." In "Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race," Rhodes shifts his focus from the scientists who created the bombs to the political leaders whose generosity made them possible. And in this latest account, he doesn't hold back. Rhodes places the blame for the careless folly of the arms race on the American cycle of political opportunism that encouraged politicians -- both liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican -- to continually inflate the Soviet military threat from the very first days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union lay in shambles after World War II. At the time, Josef Stalin begged President Harry S. Truman for aid to help rebuild. Truman's State Department not only left Soviet requests for help unanswered and pulled the plug on U.S. wartime aid, but added insult to injury by pouring Marshall Plan funds into Western Europe and giving generously to former enemies, even West Germany.

In August 1949, American generals and politicians were dumbfounded to learn that the Soviets had detonated their own bomb. A few months later, North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea. To Americans, it appeared that the communist menace was on the march. In the subsequent months, the American arsenal became formidable. In 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission had eight sites and 55,000 employees. By 1953, the nuclear weapons complex had expanded to 20 sites and 142,000 employees, and from that point the numbers floated upward. By the mid-1950s, the nuclear weapons complex ate up 6.7 percent of total U.S. electrical power and exceeded in capital investment the combined capitalization of Bethlehem Steel, U.S. Steel, Alcoa, DuPont, Goodyear and General Motors. By 1960, the U.S. arsenal had climbed to 18,638 bombs and warheads yielding 20,500 megatons. This uncontrollable growth troubled even the old war hero President Dwight D. Eisenhower. "We are piling up these armaments," he said in 1956, "because we do not know what else to do to provide for our security." Print article Despite years spent clamoring over the "missile gap," Rhodes argues, from the beginning to the very end of the Cold War, the United States led the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race. Not for one moment was there ever a chance the Soviet Union could attack the United States with nuclear weapons and not itself suffer severe, if not total, devastation. Soviet leaders, on the other hand, lived until the 1970s with the knowledge that they were vulnerable to an American first strike that could annihilate Soviet defense.

Rhodes places the blame for the tragedy of the arms race on hawkish American nuclear strategists. It fell to these men to explain why the United States needed tens of thousands of bombs, when 50 bombs would have reduced the Soviet Union to a smoking ruin. Rhodes features the usual suspects in this narrative: the H-bomb-loving physicist Edward Teller, the commie-hating Harvard historian Richard Pipes, and the ever-anxious weapons analyst Paul Nitze. In addition, other familiar faces enter the picture: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an early prot g of Nitze, as well as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. The biggest threat for these men was not nuclear war, but detente, which threatened budgets and with them the power and authority of the Cold Warriors. When detente set in, these men created an advocacy group, The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), where in the 1970s we find Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney cutting their teeth in the arts of manipulating intelligence data and radically exaggerating the threat of the enemy. By the second Iraq war, they were old hands at seeing threats where none existed.

The CPD, in fact, threw up so many obfuscating clouds -- asserting that the Soviet Union was stronger than United States, that the Soviet Union sought to dominate the world, that arms control was a Soviet trap -- that CPD analysts, along with the intelligence and scholarly community, missed the real story: beginning in the mid-1960s the Soviet economy was starting to tank. The same analysts overlooked the American side of this story as well; during the same period of phenomenal American economic growth, the United States' cities were falling into decay. The military was siphoning tax money from the healthy economy and diverting it to weapons.

And then President Ronald Reagan came along and appointed no fewer than 31 members of the CPD to office. In just his first five years, Reagan spent more than Presidents Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter combined, and more than the cost of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. And he spent all that money on a fiction. Yet for some it was a useful waste of public funds. Reagan had long trumpeted the evils of big government, which he linked to the evils of communism. To build more bombs and missiles, Reagan joyfully cut domestic programs, which dropped by 21 percent, while increasing defense funding, which spiraled a whopping 45 percent. This shift in spending priorities was critical. As Rhodes writes, "Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear arms race and the corresponding militarization of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national-security state that held the entire human world hostage."

There are only a few heroes in this history. The one who emerges, Ulysses-like, is the stocky, balding Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, shocked into fear by Chernobyl, stubbornly and insistently convinced Reagan to approach the negotiating table. Reagan's advisers, plotting to corrode negotiations, advised Reagan to demand unreasonable concessions from the Soviets. Gorbachev disarmed American negotiators, notably Secretary of State George Schultz, by agreeing to one concession after another until there was nothing left to do but sign the death notice on the arms race. The agreement came decades too late and did not accomplish what Gorbachev had planned -- the total eradication of nuclear weapons. Reading Rhodes calls up Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, where, in the corner of the underworld, Michelangelo painted himself peeking out through fingers clapped over his face, watching in horror as men engaged in their great folly.

Kate Brown, author of "A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland," is writing a history of the world's first two plutonium cities in the Soviet Union and the United States.