The Dead Hand; The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
Gene Thorp (Map) New York: Doubleday, 2009. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. x, [4], 575, [3] pages. Illustrations. Abbreviations in Notes. Endnotes. Index. David Emanuel Hoffman is an American writer and journalist, a contributing editor to The Washington Post. He came to Washington D.C. in 1977 to work for the Capitol Hill News Service. In May 1982, he joined The Washington Post and covered the George H. W. Bush presidency. His White House coverage won three national journalism awards. He became Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post in 1992. From 1995 to 2001, he served as Moscow bureau chief, and later as foreign editor and assistant managing editor for foreign news. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2010 for his second book, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy. The Prize citation termed it "a well documented narrative that examines the terrifying doomsday competition between two superpowers and how weapons of mass destruction still imperil humankind." Derived from a Kirkus review: This penetrating look at the history of the Cold War. One of its aspects was the notion that the Soviet military created ?Dead Hand,? a missile system that led to further assumptions that the civilian leadership and military command system were dead and gone. The Soviet brass, writes Washington Post reporter Hoffman, tried to push through a computer-loop design by which the machines would decide when to unleash hell without human intervention. One of the many virtues of Hoffman?s book is that it depicts not just the death-tainted hand of the military-industrial complex in the United States, but also in the Soviet Union, where supposed strongmen like Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov had considerable trouble keeping the warmongers under control. Indeed, readers will realize how lucky we are to have escaped being destroyed at their hands. A compendium of discomfiting, implication-heavy facts, of particular interest to students of geopolitics. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Cold War, Arms Race, Nuclear Weapons, Ken Alibek, Arms Control, CIA, Chernyaev, Katayev, KGB, Nuclear Weapons, George Shultz, Strategic Defense
ISBN: 9780385524377
[Book #76887]
Price: $45.00