The historian Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-two books, among which my two favorites are The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: the Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Both of these works of scholarship, despite some serious flaws, were engaging and thoroughly researched accounts of literally earth-shaking developments in the field of armaments.

Rhodes’s latest book, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, is a continuation of his previous interests. But it is also something else: an account of the cold war that is an almost perfect perversion of historical methods. It leads, unsurprisingly, to the traducing of history itself.

For his past labors, Rhodes has won a Pulitzer prize and received numerous fellowships and grants from the likes of the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Given all these accomplishments, it will be interesting to see how his latest work fares with the critics. My guess is that he will be given a pass. My own inclination, which I explain in my review here in the October issue of COMMENTARY, would be to give it another Pulitzer as the most outlandish book of the year.