The Dead Hand

The Dead Hand

Review by Dennis Showalter

Hoffman, long-time journalist now foreign affairs editor of the Washington Post, successfully uses a broad spectrum of written sources and personal interviews from the U.S. and the former USSR to address a crucial subject: the end of the nuclear arms race in the Reagan/Gorbachev era and its unfamiliar aftermath, the search for the nuclear and biological hazards left behind by the imploded USSR.

The Dead Hand describes a nuclear-tipped balance of terror enduring and escalating for over three decades. Attempts at detente and disarmament repeatedly foundered on mutual suspicions and mutual misjudgments. But the Soviet Union was further along the road to Armageddon. By 1984 it had in place a literal Doomsday Machine: a system in which the decision to launch land-based missiles would be made independently, by a few officers in an underground bunker.

As early as 1975 the USSR also began the clandestine development of a massive biological warfare program. Its implications were demonstrated in 1979 when accidentally released anthrax spores killed at least a hundred people. Just how far research and deployment proceeded is uncertain; the key facilities remain inaccessible.

Hoffman’s narrative of the complex, multilayered processes that led the superpower chiefs to their meetings at Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavik in 1986 is a story of common sense and desperation in equal parts shaping behavior on both sides. Personal experiences, fear of consequences, growing recognition that “we can’t go on living like this” took the world farther along the road to nuclear freedom than had been conceivable a decade earlier.

Not, however, until the election of Ronald Reagan and the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev did previously-unconnected efforts on both sides to rein in the danger of deliberate or accidental catastrophe begin to synergize. Hoffman describes both men as “romantics and revolutionaries,” more willing and more able than their predecessors to think outside boxes. Gorbachev abhorred force; Reagan dreamed sincerely of a nuclear-free world. Gorbachev believed his country needed a comprehensively fresh approach. Reagan was convinced of the triumph of capitalism and democracy once the nuclear cloud was dissipated.

Hoffman, following recent scholarship on the subject, presents Reagan as intelligent and persuasive, at least a match for Gorbachev in the extensively described negotiations that initiated disarmament. No less valuable is Hoffman’s fresh treatment of the Soviet Union’s internal conflicts, especially within the Politburo. Gorbachev’s confrontation with the entrenched military-industrial complex structured his fundamental decision to turn away from confrontation, cut military spending and abandon a hugely expensive project for a Soviet missile defense system.

Just how short had been the distance from catastrophe emerged when the Soviets’ casualness—to use an anodyne word—regarding nuclear and biological security became apparent. The still-proceeding cleanup highlights the risks of WMD proliferation in undeveloped systems. It also underwrites Hoffman’s concluding warnings against the existing U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and his suggestions for their reduction and eventual elimination. He does not need to remind his readers that “the Dead Hand of the arms race is still alive.”

Hardcover: 496 pages

Publisher: Doubleday Broadway Pub/Div Rh ( September 22, 2009 )

Item #: 06-7616

ISBN: 9780385524377

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 1.39 inches

Product Weight: 28.0 ounces