The Dead Hand is an account of Soviet biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons through the end of the Cold War, and how these weapons drove superpower politics, that manages to be sprawling without being comprehensive. The many interesting moments add up to less than the sum of their parts.

One chain is Biopreparat, the Soviet agency in charge of biological warfare. Biopreparat spent billions of rubles weaponizing anthrax, plague, smallpox, and a host of other diseases. There was infrastructure to produce plagues to kill nations. Accidental discharges from weapons labs sickened and killed Soviet citizens. And since biological weapons were banned by a treaty the Soviet's were party to, the whole thing was officially denied for decades. Most of what we know comes from defectors, including the memoirs of scientist Ken Alibek.

Another front was the dream of Reagan and Gorbachev to reduce nuclear arsenals. Mutually Assured Destruction kept the fragile peace of the Cold War, with the risk that the slightest accident could end the world. Some classes of weapons were worse than others. The Pershing II intermediate range missile could hit Moscow in less than five minutes, opening the possibility of a decapitation strike against Soviet leadership. Against this, the Soviet's deployed a system called Dead Hand, a semi-automatic response, which in a grim parody of Dr. Strangelove, which centered on a similar automatic response, was kept secret.

Hoffman doesn't get into the grimy details of the technology, preferring instead a diplomatic history of negotiations between the superpowers. At several points, efforts which might have eliminated nuclear weapons foundered because Reagan wanted to keep the Strategic Defense Initiative. In Reagan's mind, this was a shield to protect the world from missiles. Pragmatically, it was a way to spend billions trying to prove Edward Teller's thesis that the H-bomb was good for something.

The Dead Hand is frustrating, because it brushes up against some key issues in the technology and logic of nuclear weapons which are being forgotten as the Cold War fades from memory. MAD relies on the assumption that both parties are capable and willing to respond to a nuclear attack with one of their own. This requires a chain of command which will always drop the bomb when properly ordered to, from the supreme commander down to a junior officer carrying out the actual mechanism of delivery, and will never do so under any other circumstances. Orchestrating this always/never duality is a terrifying problem in safety, and one discussed in the American context in Schlosser's Command and Control. Hoffman doesn't really get at the Soviet solutions to the same problems, or lack thereof, instead focusing on an artificial line of 'semi-automated retaliation'. The basic problem, that a relatively junior and underinformed person in charge of a mobile rocket system, ballistic missile submarine, or alert bomber can trigger nuclear apocalypse, is present in both systems.

The book is redeemed by a terrifying coda about the 90s. The Soviet WMD system was sustained by the full force of the police state, and when the USSR fell, there were thousands of sites and scientists now without support. Iran and North Korea tried to hire specialists in rockets and biological warfare. Plutonium weapon cores and enriched uranium ingots were stored in shoddily maintained facilities guarded by starving soldiers. It is a wonder that proliferation in the 90s did not end with some kind of horrific incident.

The Dead Hand tries to straddle two world: a technical focus on the actual Evil Empire of an autonomous military industrial complex procuring tremendously expensive weapons that will never be used; and the collapses of the Soviet Union as a social and political entity, and manages to do neither full justice. But the partial history is still engaging, and worth reading.