The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy

Thoroughly researched and written like a great novelist. Will appeal to Cold War buffs mostly, but also historians of the key players.

I bought "The Dead Hand" because for many years I believed there was more to the "Cold War" and its "end" than what we were taught or told. To be honest, I never bought into the hypothesis that President Reagan's massive build up of the military and zest for "Star Wars" was the "cause" of the dissolution of the Soviet "evil empire". My more "I-obviously-watched-too-many-movies" side of me even thought that Gorbachev and Yeltsin would turn out to be CIA plants in what would have been the greatest single covert operation in human history. I just couldn't believe the Soviet "ending", which came on like a locomotive, could have been chalked up to death by natural causes with American military might to speed death along. No, this State had a fast-moving cancer put there by the Americans, on the inside. Well my fantasies will remain relegated to the Fiction section, but Hoffman did proceed to scare the daylights out of me with what he revealed. I won't spoil the many "a-ha's" so cleverly researched and reported on by Hoffman, but I will say that when I finished the book I shook my head in utter disbelief that the two superpowers didn't manage to destroy humanity. The scarier part is that it is possible a serious WMD threat still exists, especially in the so-called "rogue" states: Iran, North Korea, etc. OK, a little peek: given the laughable state of security around the Soviet's weapons of mass destruction at Cold War's end, even an optimist is left to conclude that the likelihood that an WMD will be used in our lifetime is inevitable, since accountability was a joke and incentives to sellout high. Hoffman's recount of Cold War history is riveting, revealing and even revolting. I fought sleep to keep reading. Several times I was jolted by the book hitting my forehead but instead of entering eye-lid theatre, I would press on. The Dead Hand is that good. But like a curious lad who just has to see what really happens in an X-rated movie, you finish the book not sure you wanted to know the truth. The boogie man is really out there.

Superb research into the events that swirled around the Cold War between the USSR and the USA. Interestingly, Gorbachev is painted as the person desperately trying to lessen the possibility of nuclear war, while Reagan is shown to be indecisive and vascillating. Also, the history of the period shows that Reagan cannot take credit for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, regardless of what his supporters contend. Author spends too much time discussing Chernobyl and germ warfare, in my opinion. But the rest of the book is excellent.

This is an astonishing book. It is a reporter's triumph; it tells an important and (as far as I know) absolutely unknown story. It is also suspenseful and well-written; John LeCarre's endorsement on the back on the book is well deserved. David Hoffman is a longtime colleague on The Washington Post, but I do not think I'm overrating his book out of friendship. The story it tells is roughly this: immediately after signing a treaty banning chemical and biological weapons in 1972, the Soviet Union set about building a new, secret, and very extensive biological weapons capability. They were successful; they created frightful new weapons (a chemical weapons program was added later). Amazingly, Hoffman interviewed and has documents from scientists who led the program. The persistence (and language skills) required to get hold of these documents and conduct these interviews won't come along again soon. The weapons included anthrax, smallpox and plague and many more. Much of this was recovered by a ragtag team of American diplomats and scientists during the Yeltsin years. Was all of it? Probably not. (One of Hoffman's sources was recruited to teach at a university in Iran and says that many of his colleagues went there as well). While this story unfolds, Hoffman tells the more familiar story of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the unraveling of communism. He also chronicles the Soviet-US interactions in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush years, in wonderful detail and including much new data gleaned from US and Soviet negotiators. The book is a combination of diplomatic history, suspense story, and completely original reporting. I cannot recommend it too highly.