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The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy |  | Author: David E. Hoffman
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $15.99
as of 7/30/2010 23:08 MDT details
You Save: $19.01 (54%)
New (45) Used (15) Collectible (3) from $15.00
Seller: welene
Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 26821
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 592
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0385524374
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.825
EAN: 9780385524377
ASIN: 0385524374
Publication Date: September 22, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This riveting narrative history of the end of the arms race sheds new light on the frightening last chapters of the Cold War and the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today.
During the Cold War, world superpowers amassed nuclear arsenals containing the explosive power of one million Hiroshimas. The Soviet Union secretly plotted to create the “Dead Hand,” a system designed to launch an automatic retaliatory nuclear strike on the United States, and developed a fearsome biological warfare machine. President Ronald Reagan, hoping to awe the Soviets into submission, pushed hard for the creation of space-based missile defenses.
In the first full account of how the arms race finally ended, The Dead Hand provides an unprecedented look at the inner motives and secret decisions of each side. Drawing on top-secret documents from deep inside the Kremlin, memoirs, and interviews in both Russia and the United States, David Hoffman introduces the scientists, soldiers, diplomats, and spies who saw the world sliding toward disaster and tells the gripping story of how Reagan, Gorbachev, and many others struggled to bring the madness to an end. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the danger continued, and the United States began a race against time to keep nuclear and biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists and and rogue states.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
 'Dead Hand' is a lively and thought-provoking read. June 15, 2010
Pamela Boehnert (LA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book presents aspects of the Cold War that were
unknown to most of us back then. How they reflect on
and affect present-day life is told in an enthralling way.
A Must Read on Cold War History June 3, 2010
ancientexplorer (USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Dead Hand is a fascinating and fast-paced look at the last years of the Cold War. Unknown close calls and the truth of the Soviet military and economic programs has now come to light in recent years.
Sets the record straight on Reagan, showing his military build-up and standing up to the Soviets wasn't warmongering or trying to provoke war, but to hasten their collapse. People for nuclear disarmament will be surprised to learn Reagan wanted to eliminate all nukes, but couldn't as long as the Soviets were pumping them out by the thousands. The Dead Hand reveals the Soviets far out produced us in weapons, but the quality and technology quite often didn't live up to U.S. Systems. The Soviets also continued a frightening and vast bioweapon program long after Nixon ended ours (the Soviets had signed that treaty and promptly broke it). Since Reagan couldn't eliminate all nuke programs, he pushed the strategic defense initiative, or ballistic missile defense, to neutralize Soviet missiles. He thought it idiotic that our only defense from incoming missiles was to launch our own leaving both sides destroyed. The Soviets hated SDI, because they knew they couldn't beat it. Their response was the idea to overwhelm the system with more nukes, but that would only insure a nuclear response. Even though SDI wouldn't be deployed for over another decade, Reagan wouldn't drop it. It was his trump card. Finally, before the end of his term, he and Gorbachev (who shared his hatred of nukes, but let the bio programs go on) made historic cuts in nuclear weapons.
Odd that many of our politicians still oppose SDI, even though a limited version is now deployed. Who would be against protecting us from nuclear holocaust? Ironically, these are people who hate nukes, but they oppose the system that makes ballistic missile nukes obsolete! They oppose the program, and protecting us from nuclear holocaust, simply because a president of the opposite party came up with it and another deployed it!
The Dead Hand also looks at the chaos after the Soviet Union collapsed and the race to secure weapons, and the race by terrorists and countries like Iran to obtain them. Much is still out there and unaccounted for. It's amazing that nothing has happened yet.
An important book on modern history and a must for those concerned about WMDs, their proliferation and their elimination.
Face to Face with Evil May 22, 2010
Thomas W. Schaaf (Fairfax Virginia)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Thomas W. Schaaf Sr. Fairfax, Virginia
Though David Hoffman won a Pulitzer Prize for this very well written, in depth account, of the Cold War arms race and its dangerous legacy it has not been widely read, probably because, in part, of the lack of prominent enthusiastic reviews. And that group of establishment reviewers were in turn restrained because the Washington/New York establishment elite see this comprehensive account as too pro Reagan and too revealing of the neoconservative influence on arms control and foreign policy, particularly relations with Russia.
Hoffman acknowledges that the twin pillars of this inside story of both the U.S. and USSR were the Reagan years in the White House when he was a correspondent there for the Washington Post and, secondly,when he was the bureau chief for the Washington Post in Moscow during the 1990s. During that period he had several interviews with Reagan and Gorbachev granted two interviews as this book was being written. Between those crucial assignments in Washington and Moscow Hoffman spent a year in graduate school focusing on Soviet/Russian affairs and became a Russian speaker.
The period 1981-89 concerns nuclear arms and the anti-ballistic missile program (SDI) or Stars Wars as the press named it and gives the best explanation of why Gorbachev was so opposed, that I have read. The book title "Dead Hand" comes from the Soviet program designed to respond to a decapitating first strike by USA on Moscow which would let loose a barrage of ICBMs controlled by computer without any authorizing release from the Soviet leadership.
But far more menacing, in the view of Hoffman, was the chemical and germ warfare which the Soviet and Russian governments were preparing, even in the face of the 1972 Treaty which more than 70 nations, including the Soviet Union and the United States, signed ( the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention) banning the development and production of biological weapons and the means of delivering them. The treaty became effective in 1975. But as Hoffman relates in his introduction chapter " the Soviet Union promptly betrayed its signature........Brezhnev approved a secret plan to covertly expand Soviet germ warfare efforts.......The Soviet program grew and grew into a dark underside of the arms race."
Although Hoffman covers the nuclear weapons aspect of the arms control issues which were crucial during the Reagan/Gorbachev era with a skill and finesse that makes it read like a series of personal narratives the real impact and thrust of this book, in my view, are the potential consequences of the Russian germ warfare program. Not withstanding that the title refers to nuclear weapons which are indeed a horrific and major threat to civilization, the details and facts of the biological production and war plans which were extant in Russia even after the collapse of the Soviet Union are reported by Hoffman with clarity and stunning disclosures and details.
The Prologue is an excellent example which begins, "Are any of your patients dying?" Hoffman then goes on to set the scene, April 4, 1979 in Sverdlovsk, a Soviet industrial metropolis in the Ural mountains where there is an outbreak of anthrax. The quote above was from one physician to another as they encountered two unusual deaths from what looked like severe pneumonia. What had happened, though covered up for decades, was that Compound 19, a laboratory for development and testing deadly pathogens, including anthrax, grown in fermentation vessels, had been dried and ground into a fine powder for use in aerosol form and had accidentally been released into the air. A north wind had carried the anthrax spores to rural areas to the south and sheep and cattle in villages began to die and people started to get sick. By April 20, 358 people were sick. 45 died.
As the author recounts this was only one of many sites where many variations of deadly pathogens were cultivated and weaponized in huge quantities. Chapter 22, the final chapter of the book, "Face to Face with Evil" is a chilling conclusion from which I read a paragraph to my Naval Academy classmates and the wives when I reviewed this prize winning book. Hoffman describes the experience of Andy Weber, a State Department officer, posted to Kazakhstan in central Asia where a colossal anthrax-processing machine stood intact in the remote city of Stepnogorsk .
To paraphrase: " On a brilliant summer day, June 2, 1995 a chartered Yak-40 jet landed on the bumpy airstrip of Stepnogorsk carrying Andy Weber and a team of biological weapons experts from the United States. About nine miles away stood the anthrax factory built in the 1980s. Never before had a Westerner set foot in the secret plant where anthrax bacteria was to be fermented, processed into a thick brown slurry, dried, milled and filled into bombs-by the ton.
Weber climbed to the top of one of the twenty-thousand liter fermenters and looked down into it with a flashlight. The cylinder was made of specialty steel with a resin lining. He could see the impellers attached to a central rod that would stir the anthrax spores but could not see the bottom in the dark four floors below. Weber felt a chill run up and down his spine.
Hoffman then quotes Weber. "....I had never bought into Reagan's 'Evil Empire' thing. I was a product of liberal eastern schools, I went to Cornell, but there it was. I was face to face with evil."
This is a book every American who is concerned about reality and our future should read.
 A Level-Headed and Sober Assessment May 7, 2010
Kelly Cooper
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
"The Dead Hand" covers enormous swaths of narrative terrain with an exceedingly narrow focus. After briefly introducing Soviet forays into biological and chemical warfare in the late 1970s, Hoffman commences with a retelling of the political and diplomatic bullet points between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The central concern of this story is the struggle of both superpowers to reduce or eliminate their respective stockpiles of nuclear weapons, with a subplot devoted to the aforementioned biological and chemical weapons programs within the Soviet Union.
Rather than present an exhaustive study of the complex science or realpolitik pressures at play, Hoffman tends to give credence to personality by singling out quirky moments and conversational tipping points (i.e., the notes President Reagan scrawled in the margins of dense white papers seem to matter more than the content of the papers themselves). There's nothing inherently disingenuous about this kind of history, but it avoids the distinction of being comprehensive.
Apparently there is a significant amount of primary - even groundbreaking - research that has made its way into this book. This may be enough to recommend it to readers with an existing library on the Cold War who nonetheless have an appetite for historical minutia. For those with merely a passing familiarity with the nuclear arms race, this might present more questions than answers (which might recommend it as well). To keep the story moving, Hoffman often breezes over motivations, geopolitics, and technical specifics; a tactic which tends to focus the reader's credulity on the author himself. Fortunately, such credulity is ultimately well placed. There is authority here, even if it not always on display.
Finally, it reads very much like newspaper writing: often dry, with ham-fisted (and unnecessary) attempts to humanize characters, bland repetition for fear of being unclear, and a generalized simplification of convoluted realities.
 Publisher Pricing makes no sense... April 14, 2010
LCO
4 out of 44 found this review helpful
The pricing at this moment makes no sense: Kindle $19, hard cover $23, Paperback $12, audible $21. The two digital mediums that i can't resell or pass on to someone else costs almost as much as the hardcover (which obviously has 'print' costs as well). If publishers are going to limit what i can do with the digital versions, the price must be discounted to reflect the limitations. in the meantime i'll get it from my library in hard cover... because it is a book i'd like to read... and i'm not going to support the publisher's pricing model.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
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