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

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

4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 · rating details · 724 ratings · 99 reviews

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

The first full account of how the Cold War arms race finally came to a close, this riveting narrative history sheds new light on the people who struggled to end this era of massive overkill, and examines the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today.

Drawing on memoirs, interviews in both Russia and the US...more

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Published September 22nd 2009 by Anchor (first published January 1st 2009)

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Apr 21, 2012 Gail rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Cold War seems both so recent and so long ago. This book brought back memories of the day to day events and the feelings they engendered. It was a fascinating summary of the diplomacy that brought down Communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The back and forth of arms negotiations which did result in a reduction of nuclear weapons were revealing. Gorbachev come across as the major hero (at least to me) for being willing to make major changes in his system of government, though he s...more

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Jun 17, 2011 Dervishi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was a fantastic recounting of the Cold War. It was extremely factual, and did well in citing all of the sources for each piece of information and story that made this book non-fiction.

I always found the Cold War as this mysterious time period where we somehow miraculously avoided nuclear annihilation by coming up with Mutually Assured Destruction. However, Hoffman really gives us an in-depth and intimate look at how MAD came about. I was left intrigued as I learned about what the Dead...more

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Feb 26, 2011 Glenn Hyman rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Excellent book! The cold war is very much still with us. Still, Americans or Russians could send up their missiles and really the only possible responses are massive retaliation and doing nothing. I must say that I understand a little bit better the motivation of Ronald Reagan. He could not believe that if the Russians were to send up their missiles, there is not really much that we can do. That was behind the whole Star Wars thing. He wanted some way to protect us from a Soviet first strike, fo...more

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May 20, 2010 John Murphy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An overly long but still interesting history.

The author has benefited from interviews with, and memoirs of high ranking participants in the Cold War, both Soviet and Western.

Some real surprises:

Reagan and Gorbachev, during their Summit in Iceland, with only interpreters present, agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. The agreement failed when Reagan insisted that his SDI program (Star Wars) could not be restricted to the laboratory but had to be tested in space. What a missed...more

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Nov 02, 2009 Tripp rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Depending on when you call it, the Cold War may have ended 20 years ago (could have been in 86 at Reykjavik or in 91 when the Soviet Union collapsed). Maybe it is for that reason we are seeing a surge in Cold War books. Last year we saw the angry Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes, this year we have a new one from Neil Sheehan called a Firey Peace in a Cold War (just started it, great so far). Take a look at this review essay from Philip Zelikow for a number of books on the era.

In the Dead Hand...more Depending on when you call it, the Cold War may have ended 20 years ago (could have been in 86 at Reykjavik or in 91 when the Soviet Union collapsed). Maybe it is for that reason we are seeing a surge in Cold War books. Last year we saw the angry Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes, this year we have a new one from Neil Sheehan called a Firey Peace in a Cold War (just started it, great so far). Take a look at this review essay from Philip Zelikow for a number of books on the era.

In the Dead Hand, David Hoffman of the Washington Post covers both the East and West, but sheds a lot of new light on the Soviet side. He shows both the good, the realization that the nuclear arms race could end the world, and would certainly crush the Soviet economy, as well as the bad.

The bad is pretty grim. He spends quite a bit of time showing the rise of the Soviet biological weapons industry. The US, viewing bio-weapons as a strategic liability, signed and adhered to the Biological Weapons Convention and killed the offensive bio-weapons program. The Soviets feared the US was cheating, so they built a secret program with all sorts of horrors like smallpox bombs and new two punch viruses with an initial bug to weaken the immune system followed by a knockout punch bug.

Hoffman also shows the effects on international relations of the terrible management and maintenance practices, secrecy and the use of poor technology. The decrepit system allowed for the penetration of Soviet airspace by a young German in an airplane, Chernobyl, the anthrax outbreak of 79 and the shoot down of KAL 007. Recent history has tried to pin the blame on the US for this. Hoffman shows that the weight lies heavily, if not completely, on the Soviets.

Hoffman also discusses the post-war period where unemployed Soviet scientists sat in rotting buildings with weapons materials stored in filing cabinets. He reveals more about the US efforts to get weapons materials out of the newly independent republics.

I have a few minor complaints. The title is a bit of a dodge. The Dead Hand of the title refers to a Soviet Doomsday machine that would ensure that the missiles would fly even if the Russian leadership perished. Hoffman uses it as a metaphor to describe how the WMD is still out there even if we have forgotten about it. If you are expecting a book that focuses on doomsday machines, look elsewhere.

There are also times where Hoffman has done so much research that it starts to take over the narrative. The level of detail becomes a bit much and bogs down in a, fortunately very few, places. Overall I found it an engaging, well-written and informative read.(less)

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Dec 31, 2011 Andrew rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's a good book, an interesting book. I learned things about the USSR and cold war history that I probably should have already learned. Education about history is good.

There's a breadth of content and, as I understand it, this book breaks new ground in documenting and publicizing the horrible secret recent history of weapons of mass destruction. It's an important contribution to civil understanding of the threats of proliferation and I hope can inform the public discourse. I came away feeling s...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Dave added it · review of another edition

Endlessly interesting book that won the 2010 Pulitzer for nonfiction. As someone who grew up with a father in the US Air Force and who used to read his annual copies of Soviet Military Power (a public glossy put out by the Pentagon) with wide-eyed fear and fascination, this book put an unexpected bookend on my own personal history. Wonder how the USSR developed its deadly chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons? It's all here. The author interviews the actual scientists, engineers, and militar...more

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May 14, 2011 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Really great book on the Cold War arms race - and why the problems that seemed to have ended in 1991 are still haunting us today. Very readable and unbelievably haunting. (The title of the book - The Dead Hand - is the name the Soviets gave to a nuclear response system that was 100% automated and run by a series of satellites and computers that nearly ended life on earth several times. The system would, upon warning of a launch from the US, launch a missile that would fly across the Soviet Union...more

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May 07, 2010 Kelly rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"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 aforem...more "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.(less)

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Dec 16, 2010 Brad Hodges rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Dead Hand, by David E. Hoffman, is the Pulitzer-Prize winning look at the last stages of the Cold War, and it's as fascinating as it is scary. It seems that while we were all asleep in our beds, the world has come close to annihilation more than a few times, sometimes from flocks of geese being taken for nuclear missiles.

I love reading history of times I lived through, because it takes me back to what I was doing at the time. This one starts with the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. preside...more The Dead Hand, by David E. Hoffman, is the Pulitzer-Prize winning look at the last stages of the Cold War, and it's as fascinating as it is scary. It seems that while we were all asleep in our beds, the world has come close to annihilation more than a few times, sometimes from flocks of geese being taken for nuclear missiles.

I love reading history of times I lived through, because it takes me back to what I was doing at the time. This one starts with the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. president, and whatever one thinks of him, it's hard to argue that his actions, as well as his persona, brought the Cold War to an end, and helped end the Soviet Union. Hoffman frequently describes him as a man who is able to hold more than belief in his head at the same time; he was an ardent anti-Communist (his "evil empire" speech snarled relations with the Soviets), but he also had a pipe dream about the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.

Hoffman also takes us nimbly through the succession of ancient Soviet General Secretaries, who started dying at an alarming rate. Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko, and then finally the relatively young and vigorous Mikhail Gorbachev, who, though he only led the Soviets for five years, may have had more of an impact on recent world history than anyone. As Hoffman puts it, "Gorbachev did not set out to change the world, but rather to save his country. In the end, he did not save his country but may have saved the world."

Gorbachev's twin aims--glasnost and perestroika--energized arms reduction talks, and Hoffman's chapter on the summit with Reagan in Reykjavik is thrilling. It seems that the two men came thisclose to an incredible achievement, but the sticking point was one word--laboratory--in regard to Reagan's SDI ("Star Wars") weapons shield. Of course, SDI was never built. This chapter is almost as good as the incredibly lucid account of the shooting down of the Korea Airlines commercial jet in 1983, which is definitively identified here as an unfortunate accident.

The scariest parts of the book deal with biological and chemical weapons. Amazingly, the U.S. is blameless in all this. Nixon ended those programs in 1969, but the Soviets didn't believe it, and thus continued, even during Gorbachev's reign, and even beyond, when the Soviet Union broke up and the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, claimed to have stopped them. It's all chilling stuff--anthrax, plague, smallpox, all being developed as weapons, and with innocent bystanders suffering when experiments went awry. In 1979 in Sverdlosk 69 people died in an anthrax outbreak. Of course, there was also Chernobyl, which Hoffman covers in detail.

Besides the biological weapons, there was also the problem of all the nukes in a post-Soviet world. Hoffman spends one of his last chapters in a gripping narrative about how the U.S. raced to relieve Kazakhstan of a large pile of uranium--before the Iranians could by it. As Hoffman puts it, "...in some places the former Soviet Union was turning into a Home Depot of enriched uranium and plutonium, with shoppers cruising up and down the aisles."

The heart of Hoffman's research is interviews with those involved, including Gorbachev. But even more are those accounts from the Soviet scientists who worked on the deadly programs, and ended up seeing the light (and defecting to the West). At times the names come so fast and consonant-rich than I gave up telling one from another, but their stories still resonated. I especially found this passage moving: "The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of seven decades of a failed ideology, hypermilitization and rigid central controls. It left behind 6,623 nuclear warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, 2,760 nuclear warheads on sea-based missiles, 822 nuclear bombs on planes and 150 warheads deployed on cruise missiles, as well as perhaps another 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads scattered in depots, trains and warehouses. It left behind at least 40,000 tons of chemical weapons, including millions of shells filled with nerve gas so deadly that one drop would kill a human being. It left behind tons of anthrax bacteria spores...and perhaps as much as 20 metric tons of smallpox in weapons, as well as pathogens the world had never known...It left behind hundreds of thousands of workers who knew the secrets, and who were now embittered, dispirited, and, in some cases, down to their last sack of potatoes."

By the way, the title refers to a procedure that ensured, if the Soviet command were wiped out, a nuclear response would still be launched, even if no one were left alive to ignite it. It was an example of reality following art, as it was a real-life example of the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove. (less)

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Mar 10, 2013 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A history of the end of the Cold War, with a focus on how the US and Russia came down from the height of the arms race and in particular what happened to Russian WMDs after the fall of the Soviet Union. Offers favorable characterizations of both Reagan and Gorbachev, who both earnestly strove to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth, with less than total success. Ultimately it took perhaps less luminous men like Boris Yeltsin and George HW Bush to go about the nuts and bolts of ar...more

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Jan 22, 2010 LeeAnn Heringer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2010, nonfiction, russian, 21st-century, pulitzer-prize, history

A bit dry, more of a history book with dates and documents and a hundred Russian names that are difficult (for me) to remember and track, rather than a really compelling story. Though there are sections -- the Chernobyl meltdown, the fate of the loose plutonium and enriched uranium after the breakup of the Soviet Union (who could guess that Kazakhstan would be one of the success stories), the open selling of nerve gas to Syria and Iran, the continued blatant lies. Having just read Haruki Murakam...more

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Jan 22, 2012 Tin Wee rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An easy read giving an account of the buildup of the Soviet nuclear and biological weapons capabilities and arsenal during the Cold War period, in particular exposing the paranoia that guided the thinking of both the Soviet and American leadership in that time which ed to the arms race. Ironically, as trust starts to be built betw the foes, the Soviet Union collapses and a huge stock of weaponry, material and expertise are suddenly available for sale, and the chance to eliminate nuclear weapons...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history

Having lived most of my life during the Cold War and following events reasonably closely, it was shocking to learn how close the United States came to war with Soviet Union. The mind numbing production of weapons of mass destruction was madness. When coupled with incredible misunderstandings and ignorance, the situation was amazingly dangerous.

Most of us were aware of the nuclear weaponry pointed at each other. What is not as well known is the amount or chemical weaponry. More unnerving (no pun...more

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Sep 17, 2011 Mike rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Overall, a great, harrowing, and complex true tale of the Cold War arms race with special attention to the Soviet's covert bioweapons program. When I bought this book, I was expecting it to mainly focus on the nuclear and bioweapons efforts of the USSR, which would have been fine, but I was surprised at the level of detail and introspection provided on the diplomacy between the Soviets, the Americans, and the British during the Reagan-Thatcher years. Having the story told from the frontlines of...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Garrett Mccutcheon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history

A good jumping-off point for learning about the weapons arsenals of the cold war. Certainly there are books out there that are more detailed about the nuclear arsenal, or the biological weapons arsenal, but few, if any, books do so well as this book in covering both. This book was very well documented, with sources on nearly every page. Also one of the first books of this type I have read that actually considers the socio-economic side of why we were in the arms race, and the effects it had on t...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Ed rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A chilling account of how close the world came to nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War and also a fascinating account of how the Cold War ended. Very interesting on the dynamics of the Reagan-Gorbachev relationship and also the whole parallel worlds of the US and Soviet Union and their perceptions of each other. Most worryingly it has details of the appalling biological weapons programs the Soviets pursued right up to the end and beyond of the Cold War in contravention of treaties they had si...more

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Aug 06, 2012 Craig rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century-american-history, cold-war

Very powerful summation of the aspects of the Cold War that did not end in 1991, the unanswered questions about the biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that still remain behind in the former Soviet Union. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for best non-fiction work in 2010, this account written by former Washington Post journalist David E. Hoffman is both accessible and eye-opening. At its heart it's another review of the Cold War - spies, negotiations, threats, and the culture of personality m...more

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Aug 11, 2011 Jeff Rosendahl rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: cold-war

A great book for Cold War historians. Similar to "One Minute to Midnight" in that it's amazing in hindsight to realize how much the US and USSR misunderstood each other. Hoffman writes that the USSR concealed massive biological and chemical weapons programs that only came to light recently even though they denied having these programs. His writing about these weapons and the nuclear weapons that were basically left lying around when the USSR dissolved is scary...almost to the point where it's re...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Peter Fortune rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, military

Remember the Doomsday Machine in Doctor Strangelove? It was a reality in the USSR of the 1980s, as were biological weapons ready for action. This is a fascinating history of the Cold War between Reagan’s 1980 election and the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, and a chilling insight into misunderstandings that brought us perilously close to nuclear war. It details the conflicting tensions between the Reagan-Gorbachev desire to eliminate nuclear weapons and the military elite in the USSR, accusto...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Ilya rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a conventional narrative history of the final stages of the Cold War and its end and aftermath, with an emphasis on weapons on mass destruction, mostly focusing on the Soviet Union and Russia, which is not surprising given that Hoffman was the Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Post in the 1990s. The same topics are mostly covered in the relevant chapters of Richard Rhodes's Arsenals of Folly and Twilight of the Bombs. One topic Hoffman discusses at length and Rhodes doesn't is the So...more This is a conventional narrative history of the final stages of the Cold War and its end and aftermath, with an emphasis on weapons on mass destruction, mostly focusing on the Soviet Union and Russia, which is not surprising given that Hoffman was the Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Post in the 1990s. The same topics are mostly covered in the relevant chapters of Richard Rhodes's Arsenals of Folly and Twilight of the Bombs. One topic Hoffman discusses at length and Rhodes doesn't is the Soviet biological weapons program. The belligerent in World War II with the most advanced program of biological warfare was Japan, which experimented on live Allied POWs and Chinese civilians. After the war both the Americans and the Soviets availed themselves of Japanese germ warfare expertise, just as they did with German rocketry. The American program was terminated in 1969 by President Richard Nixon; when speechwriter William Safire asked Nixon whether the United States should retain a few germs as a deterrent, Nixon answered, "If somebody uses germs on us, we’ll nuke 'em." Great Britain terminated its program in 1956. The Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain all signed the 1972 convention outlawing biological weapons. However, the convention did not include an effective regime of inspections, so the Soviet Union cheated: tens of thousands of Soviet scientists and technicians worked on weaponized anthrax, smallpox, the Marburg virus and more, genetically engineering the germs to be more effective and resistant to medicine, brewing enough of the poisons in enormous stainless-steel vats to kill the humanity many times over. This was no deterrent: how can something be a deterrent if its existence is a state secret? In Sverdlovsk in 1979, anthrax spores leaked from a factory, killing about 100 people; when the rumors of this found their way to the West, Soviet scientists lied to their Western colleagues that the epidemic was caused by people eating tainted meat; the truth was only acknowledged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The extent of the program was revealed to the West in 1989, when the director of an institute that worked on spraying plague germs from a low-flying cruise missile went to France to sign a contract for lab equipment. He defected to Great Britain and told all he knew; the West hushed it up lest the news of it harms Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of New Thinking. The defector called the Canadian embassy first because he was afraid that if he were to go to the United States or Great Britain, he would be forced to work on these countries' germ warfare programs; he and his colleagues did not believe that these programs did not exist. The Canadian embassy gave him a cold shoulder but the British one was more responsive.

The title of the book comes from a late Soviet second-strike nuclear command-and-control system called the Perimeter. If a Pershing II ballistic missile had hit the Kremlin and killed Konstantin Chernenko and the rest of Soviet leadership before they had time to react to its launch, several junior officers in a bunker would check that a nuclear attack had taken place and normal communication links had been severed, and launch a special rocket with a radio transmitter in place of a warhead. The transmitter would transmit commands for a retaliation strike, which would cause nuclear-tipped missiles to automatically launch. The officers would be analogous to the twitching fingers of a dead hand; hence the title of the book. This is analogous to the Doomsday Machine from the film "Dr. Strangelove". A character in the film says, "The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" The Perimeter, however, was secret until the fall of the Soviet Union. The film is black comedy, but the book is nonfiction! (less)

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Jun 16, 2011 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pretty fascinating, and extremely scary. My only complaint might be that it focuses on the Soviet side of things, and doesn't go into depth about the nuclear control systems or internal power struggles around nuclear management in the U.S. Still, the peek behind the Soviet system is scary, and shows how a small misunderstanding could have triggered nuclear war. Nice brief history of Gorbachev, too, who I didn't know too much about, but who I respect more now for trying to pull his country back f...more

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Jun 04, 2012 Linda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: listened-to-audio-book, pulitzer-prize-winners, russian-friends, international-like-things

There's a slight chance I would have rated this higher if I had read it instead of listening to the audio. (Recall that I don't really like listening to audio books, but can handle it for non-fiction while I'm hiking or walking or running by pretending it's public radio. But this narrator did not at all live up to my favorite narrator.) Sometimes I couldn't keep track of whom we were talking about --but then again that didn't really matter. Basically this was interesting as all get out, and I LO...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: cold-war, russia

"Chilling! If you thought that Dr Strangelove was just a comedy with no basis in fact. Think again. During the Cold War, the Soviets did have a doomsday device. They also continued with the production of civilization ending biological warfare agents until well into the 1990's. These are but a few of the shocking revelations in Hoffman's book. But perhaps scariest of all is the greatest danger came well after the fall of the Soviet Union. Loose nukes, destitute scientists, and leaking bio-bombs....more

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May 13, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: arts-and-historical

The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill. In the last half of the twentieth century the two superpowers had perfected the science of mass destruction and possessed nuclear weapons with the combined power of a million Hiroshimas. What’s more, a Soviet biological warfare machine was ready to produce bacteria and viruses to sicken and kill millions. In The Dead Hand, a thrilling narrative history drawing on new archives and original research and interviews, David E. Hoffman reveals how preside...more The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill. In the last half of the twentieth century the two superpowers had perfected the science of mass destruction and possessed nuclear weapons with the combined power of a million Hiroshimas. What’s more, a Soviet biological warfare machine was ready to produce bacteria and viruses to sicken and kill millions. In The Dead Hand, a thrilling narrative history drawing on new archives and original research and interviews, David E. Hoffman reveals how presidents, scientists, diplomats, soldiers, and spies confronted the danger and changed the course of history.

The Dead Hand captures the inside story in both the United States and the Soviet Union, giving us an urgent and intimate account of the last decade of the arms race. With access to secret Kremlin documents, Hoffman chronicles Soviet internal deliberations that have long been hidden. He reveals that weapons designers in 1985 laid a massive “Star Wars” program on the desk of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to compete with President Reagan, but Gorbachev refused to build it. He unmasks the cover-up of the Soviet biological weapons program. He tells the exclusive story of one Soviet microbiologist’s quest to build a genetically engineered super-germ—it would cause a mild illness, a deceptive recovery, then a second, fatal attack. And he details the frightening history of the Doomsday Machine, known as the Dead Hand, which would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike if the Soviet leaders were wiped out.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the dangers remained. Soon rickety trains were hauling unsecured nuclear warheads across the Russian steppe; tons of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium lay unguarded in warehouses; and microbiologists and bomb designers were scavenging for food to feed their families.

The Dead Hand offers fresh and startling insights into Reagan and Gorbachev, the two key figures of the end of the Cold War, and draws colorful, unforgettable portraits of many others who struggled, often valiantly, to save the world from the most terrifying weapons known to man.(less)

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Nov 28, 2010 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a really really detailed look at the arms race that eventually ended the cold war. Hoffman did a ton of interviews, read countless memoirs and sifted through Russian and American declassified reports to put this book together. Don't be too intimidated by it though, it's very readable and doesn't come across like a textbook.

I enjoyed the parts about USSR and American politics the most. I just don't know how Hoffman came across all of the insider knowledge concerning political movements,...more

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Nov 24, 2009 Matt rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'll admit I picked this up because I am a fan of nuke porn. I grew up reading the surprisingly subtle On the Beach, the over-written, over-sexed The Last Ship, and the ridiculous Ian Slater series WW III. On television, I was thrilled by The Day After (I've never seen Steve Guttenberg the same, since). I even downloaded On Thermonuclear War, just to see what precautions I could take (step one: don't get into a thermonuclear war; there is no step two).

Some months ago, I read an article on the o...more

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Jun 14, 2010 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, international, non-fiction, politics

We don't hear much about weapons of mass destruction these days, but this history of the Cold War arms race and its aftermath is a warning bell that much needs to be done, not only to abolish nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons and stocks of enriched uranium and plutonium. Hoffman lays out in plain language the extent of unsecured weapons, weapons-grade materials and scientists and technicians who are able to make more of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

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Apr 07, 2013 Chad Sayban rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: very-good

In a word…frightening! The Dead Hand goes far beyond simply documenting how weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological) shaped policy between the superpowers. It describes just how perilously close we came at several points to all out Armageddon, far worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hoffman provides a wealth of information from sources on all sides of the Cold War. Even more chilling is how even today we are haunted by the legacy of destructive arsenals even though the two...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Shonneal rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

best cold race story yet. not sure it met its goal as a full history. it seemed to focus on the soviet world with the rest of the world added occasionally to help with framing. I would still say this was the best crafted story of the cold race and loved its message that we should still be attempting to remove the remaining nuclear weapons. we have left the fear of true nuclear war, but we have not removed the threat of nuclear attacks. the weapons still exist to destroy the world and we should r...more

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About David E. Hoffman

Hoffman was born in Palo Alto, Calif., grew up in Delaware and attended the University of Delaware. He came to Washington in 1977 to work for the Capitol Hill News Service. As a member of the Washington bureau of the San Jose Mercury News, he covered Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. In May 1982, he joined The Post to help cover the Reagan White House. He also covered the first two year...more

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7047474-the-dead-hand?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1360566264l/7047474.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7047474-the-dead-hand?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman[/url]

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

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