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

Journalist David E. Hoffman presents a detailed, full account of how the Cold War arms race ramped up, had a denouement and finally came to a close. This is an exciting narrative told like military history, treating spy actions and diplomatic maneuvers like special ops and battles. He casts a nuanced light on many key people in charting the role and dangers of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat even now.

Drawing on memoirs, interviews on both sides, and classified documents, this is an exegesis over decades of motives and private decisions that led to varied, massive, and deadly stockpiles that became dangerously unsecured in the wake of the Soviet Union collapse. As is quoted by a source in the book, it is not a concern that terrorists will become microbiologists, but that a microbiologist, driven by privation and/or ideology, may become a terrorist. That seems very prescient of the 2010 book, but the pre-Putin work seems off base suggesting Russia should not longer be deemed a threat.

The most fascinating parts of the story, are two for me: First, the eponymous Cold War nuclear control system called in Russian "Perimetr” that is a fail-deadly deterrence that can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors. By this work, it was never really realized, but instead became a set of operators hermetically sealed in a buried sphere. Some speculation exists that the system remains in use in post-Soviet Russia. Second for me is how the nuclear arms race under Reagan and Gorbachev, took dramatic and unprecedented terms. With Reagan, his mixture of idealism, hope, and science fiction dreams led him to cling to SDI “Star Wars” despite the threat it made the Russians feel. With Gorbachev, that threat made him unable to embrace nuclear disarmament that Regan wanted. The upshot of all this was thousands of weapons, down to the portable and tactical scale around the globe, despite their radiological enriched source materials, and a disintegrated CCCP awash in germ warfare techniques, technology, and product as an asymmetric response when they couldn’t short lasers from space.


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