The Book Night featuring David Hoffman’s new book on the Cold War, The Dead Hand, left people in the audience on December 1 startled to learn that many of vestiges of the Cold War are still in place.
“The Cold War is over, Moscow is no longer the evil empire, but both sides have several thousand missiles that can launch in seconds,” Hoffman said. “It’s the legacy of the Cold War that’s the problem now.”
It was this legacy that prompted him to start reporting and writing the book in 1998 when he discovered there were “loose nukes all over the place.”
David Hoffman is Contributing Editor to The Washington Post where he previously served as White House correspondent during the Reagan and Bush presidencies and was Moscow bureau chief from 1995 to 2001. His latest book, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy [Doubleday, 2009], was the subject of the OPC Book Night.
Stephen R. Sestanovich, Professor for the Practice of International Diplomacy at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, served as the interlocutor. Sestanovich specializes in Soviet and East European studies, strategic planning and international studies, and foreign policy and has written the books Rethinking Russia’s National Interests and Coping With Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, among other titles.
Sestanovich inquired about the book’s title, which Hoffman said is named after a real dooms-day machine that was created by a Russian scientist who Hoffman interviewed. The Dead Hand operated whereby if the Soviet leadership were killed, there would be an automatic response to rain down nuclear bombs on U.S. cities. The scientist wanted to speak out about the machine saying he felt it was “wrong” to have been built. “The Soviets kept it secret through the whole Cold War,” Hoffman said. “A man from the CIA said ‘we had no idea.’”
Russia has not dismantled the dooms-day machine, so it still exists today. Hoffman said it was much more dangerous than the U.S. had known. Another unknown until now was one of the most chilling discoveries Hoffman learned when researching the book: In the 1980s, the Soviets focused on creating biological weapons and used genetic engineering to manufacture diseases that had no antidotes.
“They created hybrid disease agents that were intended to spread through a population, people would get sick, then become well and when they would relax, the disease would turn around and deliver a final blow,” Hoffman said.
The scientist who worked on this project eventually left when he saw a guinea pig’s hind legs immediately collapse after he administered a disease. “I found [the scientist] in Dallas,” Hoffman said. “He has never been talked to by a U.S. government official or reporter before me.”
Many in the audience gasped at this news, dismayed from the lack of inquiry on the government’s part and news that has gone unreported until now. Hoffman said that he researched papers from the Kremlin and the scientist’s private papers and worked carefully to put all of the pieces together. Now the papers are at the Hoover Institute and Stanford University.
The Cold War, Hoffman said, was about spending money and fueling paranoia. Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t have enough money for a space-based missile defense plan like Ronald Reagan, but knew he had to answer the U.S. and his countrymen, so he built a huge number of missiles.
“If Reagan was going to make an umbrella,” Hoffman said, “ Gorbachev was going to make it rain.”
Hoffman said Gorbachev didn’t want a Star Wars missile defense race, but wanted to instead take a third way out of the Cold War: he wanted to talk Reagan out of it, and that’s the plan he went with.
“Gorbachev didn’t have complete control of his country then,” Hoffman said. “He was incapable of pushing the U.S. or admitting publicly about issues internally. By the early 1990s, the U.S. decided to keep much of this secret because Gorbachev was doing so much good around the world.”
The first goal of Gorbachev’s, according to Hoffman, was not to end the Cold War, but rather improve the state of affairs for common people in the Soviet Union. He saw a gap between how the people lived and the platform of his political party. In response to this, Gorbachev began to try and end the arms race.
“He didn’t set out to save the world but to save his country,” Hoffman said. “In the end, he did just the opposite.”
The Book Night was co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and took place at Club Quarters on 45th Street.