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

Hoffman's "Dead Hand" is a fantastical easy read. I wonderful account of the final decade of the Cold War. A truly enjoyable book."Dead Hand" documents the unseen side of the arms race as it reached its pinnacle. The Reagan administrations aggressive pursuit of SDI coupled with the deployment of the agile Pershing II missile was a real worry for the Soviet High Command. Yet despite this stance by the US, Reagan was all but desperate to meet face to face with the Soviets leaders and convince them that nuclear weapons should be eliminated !!A real interesting part of the book describes the complete inconsistency of the Soviet Union's radar coverage which led to the shooting down of flight KAL007, another area of interest covered. Hoffman really captures the total paranoia of the communists and their constant belief that the United States were really planning a first strike strategy against the Soviet Union.However, the best aspect of the book is the in depth coverage of the Soviet biological weapons programme. A huge amount of detail concerning not only battlefield weapons but also a plan to use biological weapons in a strategic capacity. The collapse of the USSR also led to the inability to account for all the left over weapons grade material as well as the biological germs scattered across several national borders. These materials were completely lacking any security cordon and were literally available to anyone who passed by.A must for any person interested in Cold War history.

Nuff said.

As an A-Level History student studying the Cold War, I found I needed more than just textbooks to help me understand the topic, and this book was excellent in helping me to envisage the events that took place at the end of the Cold War. Although not all of book was completely relevant for my course, it was great to have so much background information, and I found it particularly interesting to read such detailed insights into the characters of both Reagan and Gorbachev. Not too difficult to read, exciting to learn, and one of the first history books I've finished without nodding off somewhere in the middle!

Fantastic book. I'd expected most of it to be about the Dead Hand itself, but was pleasantly surprised when I discovered how much more it covered. An insightful read on a surrealistic part of humanity's recent history. I'll definitely use this book as a reference in future studies.

Good read

Sometimes fact is scarier than fiction. This book tells the story of how cold war scientists could have easily destroyed the human race in multiple ways.

Read during the confinement in the hope of something interesting to pass the time. But instead it turned out to be one of the most boring books I have ever read. This guy clearly won the Pulitzer for his extensive research, not for his literary flare. The first 100 pages or so were ok but then it became a monotonous litany of Russian scientists working on germ warfare in far flung Russian towns. By the mid way point I had completely lost interest but kept plodding on expecting something to happen. It didn't. Yes, the subject matter is important, and in the hands of someone like Ben macintyre it would have been accessible and readable, but Hoffman failed to inject any life into this. Unless you're a student writing a thesis on this, avoid it

I am two thirds of the way through this book and although some of the facts are interesting (there has been plenty of research done) and the information divulged sometimes frightening this is not an easy read and reading it has become a bit of a task rather than a pleasure. There is a lot of repetition of statistics, a lot of strange Russian names and not really a very powerful narrative. I was looking for a book which gave me an insight into the Reagan/Gorbachev relationship (If indeed there was one) and up to now this has not been the case. I will plough on to the end but I am not hopeful that the final third of the book will greatly enlighten me.I have now finished the book and although the pace does pick up somewhat in the final third I was not inclined to change the tone, the title or the rating of the review. The book is not about a relationship between Reagan/Gorbachev and I suspect that the author has been under some pressure from the Publisher with regard to the book title. I aso found it most odd that the book refers several times to Doctor David Kelly (UK) but does not mention anything about his death under the strangest of circumstances.There is information in this book that should be given a public airing but overall I felt that I had not been provided with what was promised on the cover.

I'm very interested by nuclear technology/history since I am 5 years old. This book is terrifying. Very entertaining and the historic data are accurate. I highly recommend.

Fesselnd und erschreckend zugleich, und topaktuell durch die Giftaffaire in Großbritannien. Man kann in diesem Buch entdecken, dass die Strategie Russlands schon immer gleich war: Vertuschen und Verschweigen, jegliche Verwicklung kategorisch abstreiten. Damals in der UDSSR lief das so, heute genau so. Die Bevölkerung ist ahnungslos, heute wie damals. Dass Novitschok in diesem Buch bereits thematisiert wird, und es dennoch von Russland abgestritten wird, es jemals hergestellt zu haben, ist ein weiteres Detail. Lesen, unbedingt.

This book is a must read for people interested in the cold war, the arms race or general history of that era. Reads like an edge-of-the-seat thriller and makes you wonder how the hell did the world survive the Cold war, by all accounts we should have destroyed each other(and the rest of the world in the process) several times over.

I really enjoyed reading this book. The author did a great job of reviewing a lot of sources, including interviews with key players on both the US and Soviet side, and wove many threads together into a thorough, and thoroughly enjoyable story. As noted in some of the editorial reviews, at times it feels like you're reading a spy novel. And at times some of the details - particularly about the Soviet's germ warfare program - sound almost too lurid to be true. Except that everything in this book is impeccably documented - the bibliography takes up about 15% of the book.Roughly the first two thirds of the book are concerned primarily with the 1980s, from the start of the Reagan presidency, through the rise of Gorbachev, and the beginning of co-operation between the two sides on arms reduction, through Gorbachev's decline and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. The final third deals with the post-Soviet era, through about 2000. I was born in 1975, so the earlier events described in the book were things that were going on as I was growing up. For example, I remember the news reports of the Korean airliner being shot down by the Russians. I remember the German kid who flew a single-engine plane to Red Square in Moscow. I remember that my parents didn't let me watch "The Day After". I remember prime-time news specials describing the "Star Wars" missile defense. But as a kid, I didn't know the real significance of any of this stuff, and of course many of the details were classified at the time. This book covers all that and more, and it's fascinating to go back and read what was going on behind the scenes during my childhood.The author is very balanced in his approach. Reagan comes off surprisingly well, given how he is often portrayed as an imbecile. In this book, he comes across as an idealist, striving for a world without nuclear weapons, yet rather naive about how his strident rhetoric and plans for missile defense were perceived by the paranoid leadership of the Soviet Union, and for a while accelerated the arms race instead of slowing it down. Gorbachev also comes across well, a reformer surrounded by aging dinosaurs in the Communist party and an entrenched military industrial complex. But the author is by no means an apologist for the Soviet Union. There's a section toward the end of the book that sums it up well - a US official is investigating a mothballed Soviet-era biological weapons plant. He had never bought into the whole "evil empire" rhetoric. But staring down into a giant fermenter capable of producing tons of anthrax, meant to be delivered by strategic missiles to wipe out the survivors of a nuclear strike, he realizes he is staring into the face of evil.Lots of fascinating and terrifying stuff. The descriptions of plutonium pits and highly enriched uranium spilling out the windows of poorly guarded warehouses, and being transported on creaky rail cars, or the test-tubes of weaponized plague being found in an empty tin of peas, are of course scary. And the decreased cooperation of Putin-era Russia leaves a lot of unanswered questions. There are still former bioweapons sites that Russia has never granted access to. The book paints a picture of some of these programs having lives of their own, in spite of the best intentions of the leadership. So who knows what might still be lurking in the shadows.Minor drawbacks were (1) the author has a tendency to jump back and forth between strands of the story, i.e. from nuclear arms reduction talks, to the bioweapons story, in a somewhat distracting way, and (2) the author feels the need to keep reminding us who certain characters are, I guess because an American reader will get confused by all the Russian names. But for example, he keeps reminding us that a certain Gorbachev aide was the one he had a stirring conversation with during a walk in the woods in Canada.But overall - very well written, impeccably researched and documented, and a great read.

C'est une histoire de science, de mort, de hasards, de politique et d'histoire, mais aussi une histoire d'hommes et de femmes. La course aux armement, entre la fin des années 1970 et l'effondrement de l'URSS, fait l'objet ici d'un récit circonstancié d'une grande rigueur historique, qui fait aussi la part à l'analyse et la réflexion. On parle souvent des années 1950-1960 comme la période la plus la plus dramatique, la plus dangereuse de la Guerre Froide ; or la fin du 20e siècle a connu son lot de tensions. La destruction en 1983 par la chasse soviétique d'un avion civil coréen en est un symbole : paranoïa, inefficacité, brutalité, incompréhension mutuelle entre deux systèmes.Les personnages centraux du livre sont les dirigeants successifs des deux grandes puissances. J'ai particulièrement apprécié la manière dont l'auteur replacait dans leur contexte humain telle ou telle initiative, telle ou telle décision d'un Gorbachev ou d'un Reagan, qualifiés pour l'un de "radical" et l'autre de "rêveur". Le terme de "rêveur" n'est pas aussi péjoratif qu'il n'y parait, et c'est bien au croisement de l'idéal et de la dureté des relations internationales qu'il faut placer les bornes du désarmement (relatif) intervenu entre Moscou et Washington.C'est une histoire récente mais qui nous paraît enfouie dans les limbes du passé. Pourtant, notre présent a hérité des erreurs et des décisions courageuses opérées voici plus de vingt ou trente ans.Le niveau de langue est accessible à un anglophone confirmé, d'autant que l'auteur fait preuve de beaucoup de pédagogie. Il n'élude pas les questions laissées sans réponse. Pourquoi par exemple un appareil aussi rigide que celui du Politburo a-t-il hissé sur le trône de l'URSS le réformateur Gorbachev ? Pourquoi celui-ci a-t-il simultanément oeuvré à la réduction des armes nucléaires tout en poursuivant les programme d'armement biologique ?