I have finally finished David Hoffman's "The Dead Hand" - a long read at 480+ pages. Of course, I got sidetracked by "The Hunger Games." This book wasn't what I expected at first. "The Dead Hand" refers to a partially automated process put in place by the Soviet Union to launch its nuclear missiles in the event that an American nuclear strike had disabled or killed all of the Soviet leadership. For a less technological nation, it had a distinctly methodological way of developing strategic forces for employment.
This isn't a book about weapon systems. Although the subtitle is "The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy," there is surprisingly little discussion of the development of the weapons themselves. That's not to say that there isn't any - the majority of the book is about nuclear weapons, and there is talk about some of the larger and more well-known missiles. But most of the talk is between Reagan and Gorbachev (and later, Bush and Yeltsin) recounting their thoughts and fears in approaching arms control talks. This is more a story of the 1980s-1990s arms control talks, not the arms race itself.
Hoffman relies on the two leaders' memoirs and their advisors' notes for the narrative. It's strange in a way that fear drove them toward each other. Reagan was freaked out by a fictional depiction of nuclear war in "The Day After." Gorbachev was upset about Chernobyl and wanted to reign in the military in a time of economic crisis. There is little to no discussion about the actual military strategy or the military point of view regarding nuclear weapons. There's no talk about the US chemical or biological offensive programs - our biological weapons program stopped in 1972, but the chemical weapons program continued until 1991. The Soviets continued their chemical and biological offensive programs through the 1970s and 1980s, even as they denied their existence.
Of course you get to hear about Sverdlovsk anthrax incident in 1979. Ken Alibek's story of his involvement in the biological program is repeated in here, as is a short summary of Vil Mirzayanov and his work on novichok nerve agents. They are not new stories, but Hoffman skillfully weaves them into the overall narrative. A newer story is how Andy Weber, then an arms control analyst and now an assistant secretary of defense, negotiated with Kazakhstan officials to get 600 kilos of highly-enriched uranium out of the country in 1994. Weber also gets involved in examining the former Soviet biological weapons factories in that nation.
This is a well-researched and well-written book. I would have preferred more talk about the weapon systems and about the US chemical weapons program, but there was already too much information in this book. Little disappointed with the ending and the dire warning about biological weapons as the "new" strategic threat. It's very dense but readable, and packed with footnotes. Lots and lots of talks between people - the success to arms control seems to be personal relationships. Definitely worth a read for the enthusiastic arms control analyst.
Good book, though you've progressed farther than I.
Posted by: James Young | 29 April 2011 at 01:01 PM