David E. Hoffman

Pulitzer Prize winner, 2010
Contributing Editor, Washington Post
Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy magazine

David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor at the Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine. For The Post, he covered the White House during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and was subsequently diplomatic correspondent and Jerusalem correspondent. From 1995 to 2001, he served as Moscow bureau chief, and later as foreign editor and assistant managing editor for foreign news. He is the author of The Dead Hand and The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. He lives in Maryland.

 

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, David E. Hoffman (New York:Doubleday, 2009)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction, 2010.

The Dead Hand is the story of people –- presidents, scientists, engineers, diplomats, soldiers, spies, scholars, politicians and others -- who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race. They recoiled from the balance of terror out of personal experience as designers and stewards of the weapons, or because of their own fears of the consequences of war, or because of the burdens that the arsenals placed on their peoples. At the center of the drama are Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, both of them romantics and revolutionaries, who sensed the rising danger and challenged the established order. But they were not alone; many others with imagination, determination, guile and conscience sought to rein in the danger. The goal of the book is to capture the dramatic narrative of how the Cold War arms race came to an end, and of its legacy of peril – and to tell it from both sides. The book reveals for the first time the inner workings of the Kremlin decision-making in the Gorbachev-Reagan years through original documents which cast fresh light on Gorbachev’s momentous battles against the military. While nuclear weapons were the overwhelming threat of the epoch, another frightening weapon of mass casualty was being grown in flasks and fermenters. From 1975 to 1991, the Soviet Union covertly built the largest biological weapons program in the world. Soviet scientists experimented with genetic engineering to create pathogens which could cause unstoppable diseases. If the orders came, Soviet factory directors were ready to produce bacteria by the ton that could sicken and kill millions of people. The book explores the origins and expansion of this illicit, sprawling endeavor.