A chilling tale of the cold war

       From the sorry final years of Leonid Brezhnev's rule, which ended at his death in 1982, to the arrival of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985, the Soviet Union seemed to be led, as David Remnick has put it, by a series of "half-dead men in half-lit hospitals".
       After Brezhnev came Yuri Andropov,then Konstantin Chernenko: Grey eminences who each died barely a year after coming to power. A weary Ronald Reagan asked in private, after learning of Chernenko's death,"How I am supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?"
       At this same moment the Soviet Union had succession issues of a far darker sort on its mind, David E. Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand , his authoritative and chilling new history of the Cold War arms race.
       His book takes its title from a Soviet doomsday machine first conceived under Brezhnev. Because the Soviets feared "decapitation"- the killing of its leaders in one fast, huge US nuclear strike they developed an automatic retaliatory system to launch their missiles even if their command structure no longer existed. Thus the fate of the planet would rest on the shoulders of a few low-ranking officers sweating in a concrete bunker.Those officers were the twitching fingers of a dead hand.
       Hoffman is a contributing editor at The Washington Post and was The Post 's Moscow bureau chief from 1995 to 2001.In The Dead Hand he delivers a readable,many-tentacled account of the decadeslong military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. He touches the usual bases, from the dawn of mutual assured destruction through the Nixonera attempts at detente to Reagan's unshakable devotion to the Strategic Defence Initiative, aka Star Wars.
       What's particularly valuable about Hoffman's book, however, is the skill with which he narrows his focus (and his indefatigable reporting) down to a few essential areas. Thanks to interviews and new documents, he provides the fullest - and the most terrifying - account to date of the enormous and covert Soviet biological weapons programme,developed in defiance of international treaties at the same time that the Soviets appeared to be earnestly interested in reducing their weapons stockpile.
       This biological weapons programme - Hoffman refers to it as "a dark under-side of the arms race"- included the development of a super germ that mounted a grisly one-two attack on its victims: It would make them mildly ill and then, once they appeared to recover,hammer them with a death blow.
       Hoffman details how truly paranoid the Soviets were that the US would launch an unprovoked nuclear attack. He offers an inside account of how Gorbachev stood up to his own generals to slow and then reverse the arms race. And he is particularly good on the dangers, after the Soviet Union's collapse, of its stockpiles of nuclear and biological weapons,much of this material stored in unguarded warehouses.
       Almost as dangerous were (and are)the tens of thousands of newly unemployed Soviet defence workers, some willing to sell weapons or skills to the highest bidder. Hoffman recounts the story of one chemical warfare expert who ended up selling Snickers bars and blue jeans in a Moscow open-air market.
       The Dead Hand is deadly serious, but this story can verge on pitch-black comedy -"Dr Strangelove" as updated by the Coen brothers. Hoffman has an eye for bleak, jagged details. When he writes about how the Soviet disposed of nuclear waste - even nuclear reactors - by dumping it at sea, he notes that workers shot at any waste barrels that surfaced.
       He observes the curious Soviet idea that it could predict a nuclear attack by looking for a spike in prices for blood donations in Britain."The KGB failed to realise," Hoffman writes,"that British blood donors are unpaid."
       He quotes Nixon on losing his interest in biological weapons."We'll never use the damn germs, so what good is biological warfare as a deterrent?" Nixon said."If somebody uses germs on us,we'll nuke 'em."
       Hoffman gives detailed reconstructions of large Soviet blunders, like the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. But he contrasts these with quirkier (if no less unnerving, at least for the Soviets) events, like the day in 1987 when a disaffected young West German named Mathias Rust managed to land a single-engine Cessna near Red Square in Moscow.
       If The Dead Hand has a pair of looming antagonists, they are Reagan and Gorbachev, and Hoffman offers sympathetic accounts of both men's actions and thinking. About Gorbachev he is especially admiring."A leader's courage is often defined by building something, by positive action," he writes,"but in this case,Gorbachev's great contribution was in deciding what not to do." Gorbachev declined to up the ante by building a Soviet Star Wars missile system; he did not intervene during the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
       One of this book's few villains, at least on the international stage, is George H.W. Bush's Defence Department under Dick Cheney. The department opposed aiding the Soviets, as their country fell apart, to properly secure weapons.
       The Dead Hand is a large book but also a jumpy one; it's as full of quick cuts and dateline switches as a Bourne Identity movie. Hoffman is so careful not to bore his readers that he sometimes underestimates them, verging closer to Tom Clancy than to John Lewis Gaddis.More synthesis and cerebration would have made this good book better.
       The Dead Hand has a title that sounds like an early-period Stephen King novel.Its imagery is even more terrifying than King's, especially towards the end. The stray parts of the Soviet empire became - and to some degree still are, Hoffman writes -"a Home Depot of enriched uranium and plutonium, with shoppers cruising up and down the aisles".