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

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hoffman tells the story of the arms race as a war machine bigger than any of its players. In the USSR, it gains a momentum beyond the government's - or anyone's - control. There are hair-raising close calls and a couple of Bond-worthy covert operations. Though the writing is on the dry side, I was thrilled to find a comprehensive book to give me the big, cold picture. Call me crazy, but I want to know why exactly the Nuke of Damocles has hung over my head every day of my life, and will for the foreseeable future (until the robots take over, of course).

Reading about Gorbachev's struggles to shut down his country's war machine can be dismaying. The weapons programs were designed to be secret, and so they persisted in their vacuum long after they were ordered to shut down. The deception (and production) persisted despite any number of agreements, treaties, public statements and orders from the top. Paranoia flourishes, for good reason.

But if you squint your eyes just right, you can take find hope in this struggle. Institutions often have the means to resist a leader who is dead set on overhauling the country. If you think that leader is dangerous and irrational, then you're cheering for the "deep state" and hoping their objectives are the lesser evil.

Hoffman goes into detail about the US's efforts to prevent a weapons diaspora once the USSR crumbles. A particularly chilling passage recounts an American official finding a old tin of peas in an abandoned factory. Instead of peas inside, he finds test tubes of weaponized plague.

Hoffman doesn't have solutions, but leaves plenty to worry about:
-Russia is still hiding all sorts of things, and relations aren't improving under Putin;
-nukes are scary, but don't forget biological weapons; there's no modern day Hiroshima or Nagasaki to capture public imagination, but they're equally or more destructive;
-mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War cold, but that doesn't work on suicidal terrorists.

Ah, the good ole days when everyone wanted to live. What a bleak thing to be nostalgic for.

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