David Hoffman's Book Won a Pulitzer Prize, So it Has to Be Good

David Hoffman, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, didn’t have any nuclear weapons on him today. Which was lucky for Imus, who was running late because “I’m just not a very organized or responsible person,” he claimed.

But Hoffman, a contributing editor at the Washington Post, is not easily angered, which is probably a good trait for somebody covering such an explosive issue (pun entirely intended).

The Dead Hand focuses the Cold War from the early years of the Reagan Administration up through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then into the 1990s.

“We built more and more weapons, each side, toe to toe,” said Hoffman. “We had these cocked guns aimed at each other, and finally at the end, two guys, Reagan and Gorbachev, they basically decided to back down.”

But the guns and weapons that the United States and the Soviet Union had built up over the years were all still there. As a result, Hoffman reported, there remain 23,000 nuclear warheads in the world, 18 years after the end of the Cold War.

Though 95 percent of the nukes are under Russian or U.S. control, Hoffman still wondered, “What are we doing?”

The title of his book refers to a secret doomsday machine the Soviets built in a concrete bunker, hundreds of feet underground. “They were afraid if we hit them with a nuclear missile in the Kremlin, they wouldn’t be able to respond,” Hoffman said of the rationale for building “the dead hand,” which derives its name from the movie “Dr. Strangelove.”

“They made a machine that would guarantee some sort of response if they got hit first,” he continued. Though a computer initially ran this retaliatory machine, the Soviets changed their minds. “They built a deep underground bunker in the shape of a round globe, and put three guys in there, and said, ‘You are the last guys to decide on retaliation, and here’s the button.’”

The mystery remains whether those three people would have actually launched the weapons in the event of an attack. “They might not have,” Hoffman speculated.

As for the latest nuclear agreement between the U.S. and Russia, signed last week by Presidents Obama and Medvedev, Hoffman doesn’t think it goes far enough by giving each country 1,550 nuclear warheads.

“We could make the world a whole lot safer with a lot less of these nukes if we could just talk the Russians into having fewer,” he said. “The Cold War is over! People forget one nuclear weapon could blow up a city. What do we need thousands of them for?”

Though The Dead Hand reads like a novel, it doesn’t get much realer than that.

-Julie Kanfer