Albert Einstein once said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” While he died during the earlier years of the Cold War, a decades-long conflict that never led to any combat but did cause intense strain, competition, and espionage between the two global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, his statement proved to be remarkably prescient. David Hoffman structures his whole book on the horrifically powerful and destructive weapons produced during the arms race of the Cold War that are still here in the present day that have the potential to obliterate the planet. The Dead Hand won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for general nonfiction and the book certainly
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The Dead Hand is a book concentrated on a political conflict, and so themes related to this are centrally focused on while the Cold War’s effect on society and culture are explored to a much lesser extent. All of the countless political strategizing, spies, and diplomatic missions and treaties mentioned in this book fall under the broad theme of politics and are clear on every page. The ideological clash of communism versus capitalism is occasionally mentioned, like when Reagan is described as a “staunch anti-communist” (Hoffman 28) and he calls the Soviet Union an “evil empire” (Hoffman 9), and a leader of a Soviet biological weapons facility describes how “we had been taught as schoolchildren that the capitalist world was united in only one aim: to destroy the Soviet Union” (Hoffman 139). Hoffman’s book is severely lacking in discussion of how society related to the Cold War, as there is nothing of substance on this
The Dead Hand is a book concentrated on a political conflict, and so themes related to this are centrally focused on while the Cold War’s effect on society and culture are explored to a much lesser extent. All of the countless political strategizing, spies, and diplomatic missions and treaties mentioned in this book fall under the broad theme of politics and are clear on every page. The ideological clash of communism versus capitalism is occasionally mentioned, like when Reagan is described as a “staunch anti-communist” (Hoffman 28) and he calls the Soviet Union an “evil empire” (Hoffman 9), and a leader of a Soviet biological weapons facility describes how “we had been taught as schoolchildren that the capitalist world was united in only one aim: to destroy the Soviet Union” (Hoffman 139). Hoffman’s book is severely lacking in discussion of how society related to the Cold War, as there is nothing of substance on this