Recommended: The Dead Hand

I highly recommend the recent book “The Dead Hand” by David E. Hoffman. The title refers to the doomsday machine the Soviet Union built in the 1980s to automatically launch its nuclear missiles toward the US in the event that the Soviet leadership had all been killed or disabled – a frighteningly real Dr. Strangelove device. Hoffman’s book details the political and military story on both sides from about 1975 to the mid-1990s as the Soviet Union fell apart and as American presidents and Soviet leaders hesitantly approached arms control deals, even as military leaders and hardliners on both sides tried to sabotage or evade such deals. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and recently declassified documents on both sides, it paints a fascinating picture.

It will not be a comforting book to read. It reveals just how blinded the Soviet leadership was by its own ideology, and just how equally blinded American leaders were by their own ideology – both sides locked into their self-created myths about the other side. It reveals how poorly the intelligence agencies on both sides did at gathering accurate and useful intelligence. In fact, almost all the good intelligence on both sides came from defectors and walk-in spies, not from the enormously expensive efforts of the intelligence agencies themselves.

It will not be a comfort to those older “peacenicks” and liberal believes who naively bought into the Soviet propaganda and really believed the Soviets weren’t lying about their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

It is revealing how often the elite “experts” on both sides were completely wrong in their assessments. And it is revealing how slow and inept the American government was to appreciate the danger posed by all those loose weapons and unemployed Russian scientists after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yes, we finally, after some years, got our act together and managed to buy some of the nuclear material and remove it from former Soviet satellite states, and help them build better protection for some of the remaining facilities, but it was in the face of stiff opposition from our own entrenched military and intelligence agencies.

All in all and important book, if not a comforting one.