The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

Amb. Neumann’s perspective as a distinguished statesman with multiple layers of political-military experience makes this book one that should be on the list for all assignees to the Afghani- stan-Pakistan theater. “Read this book, learn the lessons therein, or fail in Afghanistan,” concludes former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Roger Dankert, a Foreign Service offi- cer from 1970 to 1996, is a former member of the AFSA Governing Board. In retirement, he has worked as a When Actually Employed annui- tant for the State Department in vari- ous capacities. Close Call The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy David E. Hoffman, Doubleday, 2009, $35, hardcover, 577 pages. R EVIEWED BY K EMPTON J ENKINS David E. Hoffman, a former Wash- ington Post correspondent, has pro- duced an eye-opening account of a little-known piece of unfinished busi- ness from the Cold War that threat- ened to turn our planet into an un- populated desert. The Soviet Union’s super-secret bi- ological weapons program, approved by Premier Leonid Brezhnev, pro- duced a terrifying inventory of toxins in direct violation of the 1975 Biologi- cal Weapons Convention. The Krem- lin insisted that it had no choice but to match a parallel U.S. program that pre- dated the treaty, but failed to acknowl- edge that Washington was winding down its research, even as Moscow ramped up its own initiative. More- over, while the U.S. research (based at Fort Dietrich, Md.) remained largely within the scope of the BWC, the So- viets conducted their program at se- cret sites in what is now Ukraine, producing and stockpiling weaponized biological ingredients of devastating potential. Hoffman has conducted outstand- ing research, interviewing several top Soviet officials, largely chemists, who led the program. His efforts to un- cover a convincing rationale for the work are fascinating but for the most part unsatisfying. They reminded this reader of the “following orders” excuse offered by the many Nazi officials who felt obliged to participate in Hitler’s “Final Solution.” His title references the fact that at about the same time, Soviet lead- ers invented a doomsday program dubbed the “Dead Hand.” If com- munist officials were killed in a first nuclear strike by the United States, then a “small crew of duty officers surviving deep underground” would still be able to retaliate. A similar commitment to mutual assured de- struction and disproportionate re- sponse underlay the USSR’s biologi- cal weapons program. The first serious evidence of the program appeared in 1979, when a major accident at the Sverdlovsk an- thrax plant in the Ural Mountains killed 64 workers and residents and hospitalized 30 more. At the time, Moscow blamed the incident on tainted meat, but the explanation was not persuasive. Over time, Soviet scientists began to awaken to the insanity of their work. Once Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s “glasnost” reforms took hold in the 1980s, more and more researchers co- operated in opening up their records to American and British inspectors. But the key breakthrough came in 1989, when Vladimir Pasechnik defected and revealed the scope of the biological weapons program. The next year, Gor- bachev shut it down. The collapse of the Soviet Union posed the question: How could Mos- cow destroy the weapons that posed such a terrifying threat to civilization? The U.S.-led effort to help do just that is at the heart of Hoffman’s book. The DeadHand celebrates many he- roes on both sides, ranging from Presi- dent Ronald Reagan and Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to Senators Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R- Ind. — who took the lead within Con- gress to pass what would become the 1992 Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program. Equally impor- tant, if less well known, was Andy Weber, who led the U.S.-British team that, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s support, searched for anthrax spores and other biological agents at fa- cilities throughout the former Soviet Union. The ColdWar resulted, of course, in a dramatic victory for the free world, and nearly 20 years later, we are right to celebrate that achievement. But it is chilling to reflect on the dimensions of the threat from the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that each party to that global conflict accumulated. It is also sobering that such weapons still pose harrowing dangers in the hands of not just a few nations but countless ter- rorists, as well. ■ Kempton Jenkins was a Foreign Service officer for 30 years, serving in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, Caracas andWashing- ton, D.C. His memoir, Cold War Saga , will be published later this year. 70 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 0 B O O K S