The Dead Hand

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.