ENGINES OF WAR Merchants of Death and the New Arms Race <i> by James Adams (Atlantic Monthly Press: $19.95; 297 pp.; 0-87113-352-0)) </i>

Now that communism’s virtual collapse in Europe is helping us forget “the doomsday clock” and other dreadful Cold-War imagery, we are inclined to dismiss military correspondents such as James Adams of the London Times, who stares at us gravely from his jacket-cover photo, his hair wind-swept, as if from a recent mission covering the dangerous covert warfare described in these pages.

We note the outdated nomenclature (America and the Soviet Union are described as the world’s “two great countries”) and the reporting that does not seem to have been updated since this book appeared in England earlier in the year. Adams tells us, for example, that a high explosive called Semtex, perhaps the world’s most dangerous “engine of war,” is manufactured only in Czechoslovakia; is Vaclav Havel’s government likely to crack down on production?, we’d like to know, and if so, will other small countries be able to pick up the slack?

Unfortunately, though, we remain aware that these are merely quibbles which do little to undermine Adams’ basic argument that new threats are appearing, not only from the A-bomb (now that Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu civilizations have it) but from what we might dub the C-bomb: chemical weapons. They are “the nuclear bombs of the Third World,” Adams reports, and they range from cheap, virtually undetectable explosives such as Semtex to deadly genetically engineered weapons such as tularemia bacteria, only .077 an ounce of which can produce a cloud 325 feet high, covering six-tenths of a mile and infecting thousands of people.

Adams’ grave mien is no doubt the product of his frustration at superpower blunders that have allowed developing nations to procure this high-tech weaponry (Stinger missiles sent to the mujahedeen , for instance, were later fired back at U.S. helicopters from Iranian gunboats) and of his outrage at First-World nations who wittingly help the arms merchants.

The worldwide regulatory policy Adams says we need, however, will be a long time in coming, as one can see from Adams’ own argument. He glibly dismisses developing nations who assert that they have as much of a right to possess nuclear weapons as the First World. But only a few paragraphs later, he inadvertently confirms the fears that have caused some of these countries to assert that right, claiming that “The West should not lower its guard (because) the unpredictable could happen, and the Soviets and Americans could confront each other over a modern missile crisis.”