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Re-Examining The Cold War Arms Race

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

In one popular version of recent history, President Ronald Reagan precipitated
the end of the Cold War through his words, tear down this wall, and through his
decision to pursue the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile shield that was
nicknamed Star Wars. My guest, David Hoffman, is the author of a book that
reveals how Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev really reacted to those two
things and credits Gorbachev for being the agent of change in the Cold War.

The book, "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its
Dangerous Legacy," uses new evidence - contemporaneous documents, diaries, as
well as new interviews - to investigate how Gorbachev and Reagan actually
viewed each other and the dangers we faced from Soviet weapons we didn't even
know existed.

The U.S. and Russia are now close to agreement on a new strategic arms
reduction treaty to replace the treaty that expired December 1, and on March 1,
President Obama will send Congress the Nuclear Posture Review, a review of our
nuclear weapons and our nuclear strategy.

My guest, David Hoffman, covered the White House during the Reagan years for
the Washington Post and later became the paper's Moscow bureau chief and
assistant managing editor for foreign news. Our interview was recorded in
October.

David Hoffman, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's start with a sense of how scary
things actually got during the Cold War. You call 1983 the year of the war
scare. Let's start with a good example of why you call it that.

Shortly after Reagan had called the Soviet Union the evil empire in September
of 1983, a Soviet early-warning station received signals that an American
missile attack had begun. Would you describe what happened at this Soviet
early-warning station?

Mr. DAVID HOFFMAN (Author, "Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms
Race and Its Dangerous Legacy"): Yes. The man on duty was a specialist in this
early-warning system. He knew all of its ins and outs and its failures, and he
had helped build it, and he was on duty that night when a large red light began
flashing on the big map.

And this light would flash when there were signs from the satellite of a
possible missile launch. At first, he thought it could be an error, just one
missile. Why would they launch just one missile if this was nuclear war?

But what really frightened him was not too long after that, the whole thing
went red, and this time, he saw a banner of words across the top of the screen
he had never seen before that said there was more than one.

There were five missiles launched, and this really caused him to feel, as he
said, his legs were paralyzed. But he calmly and coolly went through the
checklist and the routine, what to do to see if it was for real. And in the
end, he made an instinctive, a guts decision, that it was a false alarm. And he
called his bosses and said it's a false alarm.

GROSS: So it was instinctual. It wasn't empirical. He had no evidence that it
was a false alarm.

Mr. HOFFMAN: A lot of this is instinctual, but he did run some checks. They
were very difficult because the check was to look through something like a
periscope or a telescope, and he didn't see any missiles coming. But the system
in front of him that was set up to be a warning system was flashing red. So,
the instinct was to take the data that he had and make a call.

GROSS: So, say he made the wrong call. Say he believed the warning system that
said five missiles were heading to the Soviet Union. What would he have done?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Well, he would have picked up that phone and told the headquarters
this, and they would have then passed the signal further up the chain. The
chain didn't go much further than to the Kremlin and the general staff of the
Soviet military.

And if it was confirmed that there were missiles coming or further evidence,
there were additional sensors as time went by, they would wake up the general
secretary and the top military officials, the defense minister, and they'd have
to make a decision about what to do.

And what to do could've meant, first of all, asking themselves what evidence do
we have that we're under attack. But there's only minutes, Terry, to make a
decision like this. You know, this is one of the most excruciating scenarios
you can imagine if you are the leader of the United States or the Soviet Union.

You have only minutes, and if you have a fellow in an early-warning station
saying, yes, the map is flashing red, you know, do you press the button based
on this fragmentary information?

Gorbachev told me once in an interview that his greatest fear was that it would
be a flock of geese, and somebody would make a mistake.

GROSS: Now, your book is called "The Dead Hand," and this refers to a
retaliatory system, a kind of automated retaliatory system that Soviets
created. Would you talk about what the dead hand is?

Mr. HOFFMAN: You know, the Soviets had a series of very, very old leaders who
had a lot of difficulties governing: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. And in this
time when their leadership was aging, they gave some thought to those crucial
minutes I described, when you have to make such a difficult decision.

And they thought that they could help those leaders by creating an alternative
system so that the leader could just press a button that would say: I delegate
this to somebody else. I don't know if there are missiles coming or not.
Somebody else decide.

And if that was the case, he would flip on a system that would send a signal to
a deep underground bunker in the shape of a globe where three duty officers
sat. If there were real missiles, and the Kremlin were hit and the Soviet
leadership was wiped out, which is what they feared, those three guys in that
deep underground bunker would have to decide whether to launch very small
command rockets that would take off, fly across the huge, vast territory of the
Soviet Union and launch all their remaining missiles.

Now, the Soviets had once thought about creating a fully automatic system, sort
of a machine, a doomsday machine, that would launch without any human action at
all. When they drew that blueprint up and looked at it, they thought, you know,
this is absolutely crazy. We need a human firewall.

So that's where those three guys in the bunker came into play, but they could
only act if the Soviet leader had flipped on the switch, if their sensors
indicated they were really under attack, and there's been a big debate about
the nature of those three guys.

Would those three guys in the bunker make a decision that they had been drilled
in training for years to make, go down the checklist, if all signs are go,
would they launch the missiles? Or would they be real people in a crisis
situation feeling the shockwaves of nuclear explosions and wondering what's the
point?

And that answer has never been given. But we know that that system was built.
It was called Perimeter, that was its codename, and it was designed as a
semiautomatic retaliatory system. It would take the pressure off the Soviet
leader. It would provide them a backup in case they were attacked, and the
Soviet leaders were wiped out. But it still left the fate of the earth in the
hands of three duty officers deep in an underground bunker.

GROSS: So you've just described this semiautomatic retaliatory missile system
that the Soviets created. The Soviets kept this system secret, even though you
could argue that it would've contributed to the strategy of deterrence through
mutually-assured destruction because if the U.S. knew that the Soviets had this
semiautomatic retaliatory system, it might have given the U.S. pause about ever
launching a nuclear strike, not that there weren't already reasons to pause,
but this would be yet another one. Why do you think the Soviets kept the system
secret?

Mr. HOFFMAN: I think this was characteristic of the Soviet Union. They made a
lot of really stupid decisions about secrecy. They kept...

GROSS: You think that was a stupid decision?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Yes because as you just pointed out, it would've had some
deterrent value. If they had told the Americans, if you wipe out our
leadership, we have a way to retaliate, that would cause us to think twice. But
because we didn't know about it, they built this elaborate system, and they hid
it so that it had no deterrent value, and therefore I think it was more
dangerous.

GROSS: How did they hide it?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Well, one thing is - I mentioned that they would launch this
little command rockets that would order all the other rockets. Those were
disguised so that we couldn't see that they were any different. They built this
bunker deep underground, and they kept it so secret that even though we had
arms control treaties and discussions with them about missiles and warheads,
this never appeared in any of those discussions.

GROSS: Do you know if the Soviets ever came close to using the dead hand?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Nobody knows for sure. I think probably they drilled on it. I know
it was built. I know that they gave it its final flight test in November of
1984, and they put it on combat duty early in 1985. And in the book, I
interviewed the man who brought it to final combat duty and who did a lot of
the engineering and the wiring, and it's a real system, and it really exists.

GROSS: How does he feel about it now?

Mr. HOFFMAN: This man who worked on it, his name is Vlaryarinich(ph), feels
that the system is actually a symbol of one of the things we should think about
how to take down after the Cold War. He worked on it, but he would like to see
both the United States and Russia sit down at a table with the blueprints and
take this stuff down, shall we say unplug it, because it really is a relic from
an earlier era.

GROSS: Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's still plugged in?

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Are you saying this system is still plugged in?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Terry, we don't really know if there's still a switch in the
Kremlin. But that aside, I think the command rockets, the bunker, the entire
Perimeter system is still there and waiting. And I think the command system
part of it is still functioning.

The Soviet Union collapsed, and it's possible that when the Soviet Union
collapsed and became all these independent countries, including the large one,
Russia, and the others, that they changed the command system so that there
isn't a switch for the Dead Hand right in the Kremlin.

I don't know, but I've been told that that command structure may have changed.
But I do know that the men in the bunker are still there. The system is still
alive. It's still a command system.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist David Hoffman. He's
the author of the new book "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War
Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy." Let's take a short break here, and then
we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist David Hoffman, and
he's a former White House correspondent for the Washington Post. He covered the
Soviet Union for the Washington Post. Now he has a new book called "The Dead
Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy."

GROSS: President Reagan had pushed to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative,
the missile shield. Would you describe what Reagan hoped to achieve with the
missile shield?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Well, Reagan said in the second inaugural address that he hoped to
make nuclear weapons obsolete. In fact, he never accomplished that. The nuclear
weapons are still with us. But the missile shield project was a dream of
Reagan's, a vision. And it was sort of a ghost invention, you know, it never
was really built on that scale, but the talk about it had a big, big impact in
Moscow.

GROSS: What was the impact the talk of it had in Moscow?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Well, this is really interesting because, you know, for many
years, we were at the mercy of what the Soviets told us in their propaganda, in
their speeches, in their newspapers. And one of the things I feel I really
accomplished in this book is I got original documents of what they were saying
to each other back then about the Strategic Defense Initiative.

And Gorbachev went through a period of metamorphosis, of evolution in his
thinking, because at first, when he first came in, you know, maybe three months
after he first took office, all the big rocket designers brought to him a
gigantic plan to build their own Strategic Defense Initiative.

And you can just imagine these guys' eyes were gleaming at the whole idea that
they'd get more contracts, there'd be more rockets. And Gorbachev basically
looked at them, and he put this plan in the bottom drawer. He didn't actually
tell them to go out and build it. He was not fully in control at this time. He
had to out-fox them, but he out-waited them. So the first thing that I think is
really important in answer to the question is Gorbachev did not build his own.

GROSS: But an important implication of what you're saying is the Strategic
Defense Initiative that Reagan wanted to make nuclear weapons obsolete nearly
escalated the arms race. And it was only because Gorbachev put all this on the
back burner and tried to stall it that it didn't escalate the arms race.

Mr. HOFFMAN: Well, let's go to the next stage. What happened next? Gorbachev
also entertained the idea that instead of building his own missile defense, he
could just do something that the Soviets did very well, and that would be build
more missiles. And this was also a real plan that I discovered in the
documents.

Some of the planners said look, why don't we overwhelm Reagan's idea, and let's
take one of our missiles, the SS-18 - it was the biggest missile in the Soviet
arsenal. At the time, by treaty, it had 10 warheads on each missile. They had
308.

Some of those guys said look, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, let's put 38
warheads on every single missile. We will triple, quadruple the number of
warheads, and that will overwhelm Reagan's shield. And Gorbachev actually
raised this with Reagan once at their Geneva Summit in 1985.

It was still his first year, but you know, Terry, Gorbachev didn't want to do
that, either. He did not want an arms race in space, and he did not want an
arms race on earth. And that in some ways is part of his contribution. He did
not respond to Reagan's Star Wars by building his own or building more-
dangerous warheads.

GROSS: Now, you say that there were physicists in the Soviet Union who thought
that Reagan's idea of this missile shield was basically technically impossible
now, that there's no way the Americans were going to actually succeed. And
there were many - you say there were scientists in the Soviet Union that were
wondering: The Americans must know that they can't succeed with this, so why
are they going forward?

Mr. HOFFMAN: The physicist was Yuvguini Pavlovich Belikov(ph), and he told
Gorbachev, he said, you know, in the late '70s and the early 1980s, before you
came to power, we studied this extensively, and we're certain that the physics
involved are such that Reagan will never be able to succeed at shooting down
missiles with a laser and that it'll be extremely difficult to shoot missiles
down in mid-flight. It's like hitting a bullet with a bullet.

But of course, this led to a big discussion about Belikov's conclusion because
the experts in the Soviet Union said, you know, we really admire the Americans.
They are pragmatic. They build things for reasons, and they do things because
there's a goal. And we can't figure out, we cannot understand: Why is the
United States, under Ronald Reagan, spending so much money for something that
we don't think will work?

GROSS: Do you feel you can answer that question any better now than you could
then, when you were covering the Reagan White House?

Mr. HOFFMAN: You know, their answer was to wonder if this was some kind of
iceberg, if there was some huge, hidden part of it. And their answer was that
Reagan was secretly trying to prevent the military-industrial complex in
America from going bankrupt.

Well, that was kind of a silly answer, but it reflected their own military-
industrial complex, which was huge. So their attempts to understand this were
confounded. They were puzzled for years.

I think that Reagan was the kind of person who brought different ideas together
that many people could only see existing independently, and he fastened them
together. And the Star Wars idea appealed to him because first of all, he
really believed that it was possible to do away with nuclear weapons.

He was not one of those deterrence guys that existed through the Cold War who
thought that mutual assured destruction was a good idea. So the first part was
he did have this nuclear abolitionism that was hidden from us for a long time.

Secondly, the joint chiefs of staff in the American military told Reagan that
we have a problem. Congress won't approve any more big missiles. The Soviets
have many more than we do. What do we do? Reagan saw this as sort of a way to
leap over the canyon for the fact that Congress wouldn't give him any more
missiles. We'll build a defense, and we'll make them all obsolete.

So Reagan put these ideas together, and then some scientists also told him
maybe it was possible. Maybe if we do enough research, maybe we can actually
succeed at this. And Reagan had this innate faith in American technology and
innovation, and all this blended together, and that's what he was about.

GROSS: You said that some Soviets thought that the real reason why the
Americans were building the missile defense was to prevent the military-
industrial complex from going bankrupt. At the same time, it sounds like, from
your book, that one of the reasons why Gorbachev did not want the Soviet Union
to build their counterpart of Star Wars was he thought it would bankrupt the
Soviet Union.

Mr. HOFFMAN: I think that's exactly right, Terry. Gorbachev was a visionary. He
well understood the military burden on his own country. And when he took
office, and those guys brought him those big plans, if he had gone along with
them like a lot of his predecessors did and built a Soviet Star Wars, it
might've bankrupted the Soviet Union.

But you know, there's been a long myth that Reagan's Star Wars forced the
Soviet Union to collapse, forced it into bankruptcy. But that's not really what
happened. Certainly, Reagan's vision gave them a fright, but in the end, Reagan
didn't build it, the Soviet Union didn't build one, and the Soviet Union
imploded of its own weight and its own failures.

Gorbachev was trying to stop that. He was trying to save his country, and you
know, he didn't really succeed at that, but he might've saved the world.

GROSS: Let's talk about probably the most famous words that President Reagan
ever uttered, words that were credited by many with helping to end the Cold
War. And would you quote that for us, please?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Reagan was at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. General Secretary
Gorbachev, Reagan declared, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this
gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

GROSS: Okay, and for many people, those words really kind of set it off and,
you know, led to the end of the Cold War and reflected President Reagan's role
in ending the Cold War. What impact did you learn those words actually had on
the Soviet leadership?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Well, Gorbachev was a little bit irritated because he felt that he
had already done a lot and was doing a lot to help end the Cold War. And this
occurred in 1987, when he and Reagan were already well past Reykjavik and
moving toward signing a really important treaty, which they signed that
December, that was the first treaty that wiped out an entire class of nuclear
weapons.

It was the European Missiles Treaty. Those missiles had terrified the Europeans
for many years, and so this was the period when Reagan and Gorbachev were
really working together to get something done.

GROSS: So he was irritated. It wasn't a spur to tear down the wall. It was kind
of like, don't you get what I'm already doing here, how hard I'm trying?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Gorbachev didn't really understand Reagan nor his rhetoric, and he
felt when Reagan gave that speech at the Brandenburg Gate, it was public
relations. Gorbachev felt he was already well on his way towards slowing down
the arms race and that he was also beginning to loosen the tight grip on
Eastern Europe and telling the leaders there that they would have to find their
own way.

So actually Gorbachev was the agent of change over and over again, the person
who was thinking way ahead of Reagan about how to change the world and make it
more peaceful and safe.

GROSS: We'll hear more of our interview with David Hoffman in the second half
of the show. His book is called "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold
War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH
AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to our interview with
David Hoffman, author of the book the "Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold
War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy." It's based on documents from inside
the Kremlin as well as diaries, memories, records of politburo discussions, and
interviews. Hoffman covered the Reagan White House for the Washington Post and
became the paper's Moscow's bureau chief after the Cold War.

Now you write that even during Gorbachev's struggle for disarmament there was
this huge bioweapons and chemical weapons program that was going at full speed
in the Soviet Union. Did Gorbachev know about that?

Mr. HOFFMAN: You know, this is a very, very important discovery in my Book,
because I just finished telling you that Gorbachev was trying to break the arms
race, but this is the one exception and the one unexplained dark side of the
arms race - the illicit side. It was largely biological weapons.

The Soviet Union had built the largest germ warfare program the world had ever
seen, and at least by 1990, I found documents that Gorbachev knew about it. I
believe, and others believe, that he knew earlier. And this dark side of the
arms race continued when he was a Soviet leader and it's not clear entirely how
hard he may have tried to stop it or if he tried or what he even knew about it.
There are several people inside the Soviet system who say that as early as 1986
Gorbachev signed an order, a five-year plan for the biological weapons system.
I've never seen that order. But I do disclose in my book, and I have seen a
summary of the actions of the Central Committee, which is a high level
decision- making body, starting in 1986, there is a resolution in December on
biological weapons.

The first document that actually goes to Gorbachev that I found is not until
1990, but I found earlier documents that show that his Foreign Minister,
Shevardnadze and his military officials were deeply involved in it.

GROSS: You know, it makes the whole thing sound a little hypocritical. Here's,
you know, Gorbachev kind of, you know, leading the charge on if not
disarmament, at least limiting, slowing the arms race, but at the same time,
there's this illicit growing biological and chemical weapons program.

Mr. HOFFMAN: There are two sides to Gorbachev that come out of this research
and a lot of the documents I found really shocked me. I found agendas of
meetings with actual names of the attendees checked off, and at the top of the
meeting list, it said: a meeting to discuss work on special problems. It was so
secret, Terry, that they didn't even write the word biological weapons on the
piece of paper for themselves. They called it special problems.

GROSS: So what were some of the things they were developing in this biological
and chemical weapons program?

Mr. HOFFMAN: You know, the biological weapons program was especially diabolical
because the Soviet Union had lagged in microbiology during Stalin's time and,
you know, the United States and the West were making great leaps in the life
sciences, especially in genetic engineering. So after the Soviet leaders signed
a biological weapons convention and it went into effect in 1975, they turned
around and, secretly and undercover, started this massive program to build
biological weapons by using genetic engineering.

What they were going to do would be to interfere with - to redesign the genes
of pathogens, to turn them into agents and diseases that the world had never
known, so that if they were used in wartime there'd be no vaccine, there'd be
no antidote. And this would have a horrific affect on the battlefield or in
cities against an enemy that was unprepared.

GROSS: And it could spread around the world, right? I mean, germs aren't
confined.

Mr. HOFFMAN: Not only that, but the Soviet military liked to have germ warfare
agents that were contagious.

GROSS: Wow. I mean weren't they thinking about how the Soviets would also get
infected?

Mr. HOFFMAN: They were. And one of the things that really frightened us is when
the first defector came out with the story about this, and we looked down the
list of things they were developing, it was bad enough that we saw they were
working with smallpox and working with anthrax and other diseases, but one of
the fourth or fifth things on the list was we found that they were working on
protective measures to protect themselves. So we realized that they were
actually thinking about what would happen if they used these because they were
designing their own protection.

GROSS: Did any of the germs that they were designing or the anthrax or the
smallpox ever get out and infect people? I know there was an anthrax scare.

Mr. HOFFMAN: Terry, this was more than a scare. There was an epidemic - an
outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk, an industrial city in the Ural Mountains in
1979. More than 64 people died, and I think that this secret - the cover-up of
this particular outbreak from a nearby military microbiology facility went on
for years. And it kind of became the symbol for the entire program, because if
- the Soviets were asked over and over again what happened there. And they said
at international meetings and to the press, they said well, it was just
contaminated meat. It was a natural outbreak. But this, of course, wasn't the
truth. The truth was there had been a leak from this facility, we don't exactly
know how. But they never fessed up to that.

GROSS: So what's - where are all the germs now?

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: How secured are they?

Mr. HOFFMAN: You know, one of the things we discovered after the Soviet Union
collapsed was that they didn't only have that one small episode in Sverdlovsk
but that they had gone further and built factories. I'm talking about big,
industrial factories to produce anthrax and smallpox. And one of these
factories they built in far away Kazakhstan, in a small town called
Stepnogorsk. And they built a factory to create tons of anthrax agents if war
came.

So after the Soviet collapsed, some of these factories were abandoned, not
completely abandoned because they were moth-balled. They were sitting there in
Kazakhstan and an American diplomat found them and some of them have been
destroyed. But I would add that this is not the end of the story because three
of the military's microbiology laboratories in Russia today have never opened
their doors to outsiders. And we don't know what's going on there and whether
or not work on dangerous pathogens is still going on.

And I would remind listeners that the United States renounced biological
weapons in 1969. President Nixon said we didn't need them and we got rid of our
program and closed it down. And when I say renounced it, I mean we renounced
the use of offensive biological weapons for warfare. Obviously, we continue to
study defense. But the Soviet Union created this giant system called
Biopreparat. And everybody was told Biopreparat, that was for making medicines
and pharmaceuticals when, in fact, deep underneath it was the germ warfare
research program.

GROSS: You got to read a lot of communications between President Reagan and
Gorbachev. And I'm wondering: What are some of the things you learned about how
they really felt about each other and what they were saying to each other
behind the scenes, not in the more public comments?

Mr. HOFFMAN: You know, it's fascinating because I think both of them were both
romantics and revolutionaries in entirely different directions. You know,
Gorbachev was moved, in all the years he was a party apparatchik, to see the
poverty of his own people. And when he finally became Soviet leader, he was not
going to come to work in the morning and say, I'm going to end the arms race.
He actually came to work in the morning and said, I have to save my country.
And he had a lot of experience with this - living standards that were low with
the huge strain that his military put on the country.

And Reagan came from a country that was prospering and he was the champion
really of that prosperity, of the march of capitalism. His anti-communism was
well known for decades. But when Reagan came to office he also harbored this
somewhat inner idea that once he came to work every morning he could make
nuclear weapons obsolete. And I must tell you, as a reporter who covered him
all those years, I wrote a lot about U.S.-Soviet relations and I certainly
tried to understand what Reagan was thinking from their public statements. But
this deep nuclear abolition that he harbored, that he thought about, now comes
through. And it comes through in some of his private writings. We now can read
his diary entries and understand more what he was really thinking. When there
was that movie that was put out during Reagan's term called "The Day After,"
which depicted the horrible consequences of nuclear winter after a nuclear
attack, Reagan watched that movie and it had a profound affect on him. Those
who were around him recalled that he was depressed for a couple of days.

So when these two guys come together they are a little bit of a chemical
reaction because they both have dreams and they both have needs that are
radically different. And I think it took them a little while - certainly
Reykjavik and the experience of almost going all the way toward abolition and
then pulling back - they began to see other whole.

GROSS: I still want to get back to the movie "The Day After" a second. This is
the movie that, you know, made-for-TV movie that depicted a nuclear attack on
the United States and how horrible it would be. I'm always a little confounded
and disturbed when I hear how moved President Reagan was about that. And here's
why: Everything that was in that movie about what would happen, I'd already
heard that from so many experts, from doctors, from physicists, from, you know,
political experts. Journalists were writing about it. And to think that Reagan
didn't know this, that he hadn't thought about the extent of that devastation
until seeing a made-for-TV movie, when the information was already out there.
What does that say?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Terry, he was a Hollywood man through and through and to him, a
made-for-TV movie was much more powerful than all of those briefing books.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: I don't know. Okay.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HOFFMAN: Look, in his diary Reagan wrote: Columbus Day, in the morning at
Camp David I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air November 20.
It's called "The Day After." It has Lawrence, Kansas, wiped out in a nuclear
war with Russia. It's powerfully done - all $7 million worth. It's very
effective. It left me greatly depressed. So far, they haven't sold any of the
25 spot ads scheduled and I can see why.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HOFFMAN: My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a
deterrent and see there is never a nuclear war.

Those were Reagan's words written in his own diary at the time. That's not a
press release. That's the man speaking.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. HOFFMAN: And Edmund Morris, his official biographer said that Reagan was
dazed by this film and four days later was still fighting off the depression
caused by "The Day After."

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist David Hoffman. He's
the author of the new book "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War
Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy."

Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist David Hoffman. We're
talking about his new book "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War
Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy."

Just give us a sense of the arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union -
the extent of the nuclear weapons and biological weapons that were out there
and maybe out of control.

Mr. HOFFMAN: You know, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were still tens
of thousands of nuclear weapons. And we didn't know it at the time, but the
Soviets had had a very lax system for keeping track of nuclear materials. So
there was uranium and plutonium spread over this country. Remember, the Soviet
Union was 11 time zones. And furthermore, there was the secret biological
weapons that we didn't know much about, and there were chemical weapons, which
we did know where they were located. And, of course, since the Soviet Union
collapsed and there were a lot of individual new countries - Ukraine,
Kazakhstan, and Belarus all had nuclear weapons on their soil.

Furthermore, the Soviets had stationed thousands of these small so- called
tactical weapons all around and they had to bring those back on trains, on
rickety trains, as fast as they could. So it was a scary time.

GROSS: Describe Operation Sapphire and how that worked?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Operation Sapphire was one of the most dramatic moments in these
years just after the Soviet collapse. An American diplomat, Andy Webber, got a
tip from a man who was in charge of a metals factory in Kazakhstan. Andy was a
diplomat in Kazakhstan. He got a tip on a piece of paper. And the tip was that
there were hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium. And by that I mean
uranium that could be used for making a nuclear weapon in a warehouse, in this
metals factory.

So Webber told people in Washington, and they organized a tiger team, an
emergency team, and they worked with the Kazakhs who didn't really want the
stuff. They found that the uranium had been abandoned by the Soviets after the
collapse. It had been put there because they were building a new submarine.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the submarine project was abandoned. All this
uranium, 90 percent enriched, laying in big canisters that look like hotel
coffee pots, on sheets of plywood, in a Kazakh warehouse.

So the United States paid millions of dollars to the Kazakhs and conducted a
secret operation. It was not announced ahead of time. A group of 35 Americans
flew there in secret, in big transport planes, packed up that uranium over a
month, and then on a cold snowy day, put it into those C5 transport planes and
flew it all the way back to the United States. And the reason they did this is
that the Iranians were looking all over Central Asia for this kind of uranium.
And if Iran had gotten its hands on it, it certainly would have help accelerate
their efforts to build a nuclear weapon.

GROSS: So the Americans paid Kazakhstan millions of dollars to take their
uranium away. Were we in a way trying to outbid a potential Iranian bid for
that uranium?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Absolutely. And we didn't want Iran to get to the point where they
could make a bid.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. HOFFMAN: We were one step ahead of them. The Kazakhs wanted to be rid of
it. Remember, their country had been the nuclear testing site for the Soviet
Union. They had health problems. There was too much of this nuclear materials
around for them. So - and we knew they wanted to get rid of it. They also
inherited a bunch of nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union collapsed, and they
gave those back to Russia. So I think it was kind of an open-bazaar time, and
one of the things that really shocked the Americans when they went to do this
is they found a crate of beryllium. Beryllium is an element that is used in
making nuclear weapons. And the crate had an address on it: Tehran.

GROSS: And we still have a lot of that threat out there. There's still weapons
out there. There's still biological and nuclear weapons out there. So there's
still a lot of work to be done, right? I mean, you know, out there from the
Soviet Union days.

Mr. HOFFMAN: Well, we've been gradually and slowly cutting up some of the
rockets and missiles and nuclear weapons. We are very, very slowly getting rid
of the chemical weapons, but they also are still there. I'll just give you an
example. You remember the Tokyo subway attack, when Aum Shinrikyo put that
Sarin, that nerve gas - that was 159 ounces of nerve gas, which caused that
terrible Tokyo subway disaster. But today, still, in a warehouse in Southern
Russia, in a place called Shchuch'ye, there are tons and tons and tons of
munitions filled with that nerve gas. We're – the Russians have only in the
past year started up a factory to gradually get rid of that stuff. Those
projectiles filled with nerve gas sit there today.

GROSS: Do you feel like there's any lessons from your book about the end of the
Cold War that could be applied to how to handle Iran, how to deal with Iran,
now that Iran seems to be very close to developing a nuclear weapon?

Mr. HOFFMAN: Yes, there are some really important lessons. One of them is that
old slogan of Reagan's, you know, trust but verify. One of the things I found
when I was going through these documents of what the Soviets were saying to
themselves inside the Kremlin is that they were not interested really in
getting caught cheating. And when we would talk about rigorous and tough
verification, that we were going to check things, they listened. It was only
when we weren't looking, when we had that biological weapons treaty that had no
verification, that they felt free to cheat.

One lesson, of course, is it's really, really important to make sure you go
ahead with this thing that the jargon calls verification. The second thing is
this. When Gorbachev came in and had these radical notions about how he was
going to slow the arms race and save his country from ruin, we didn't see it.
In fact, we were so locked into the Cold War that we saw in Gorbachev maybe a
younger Andropov, a younger Brezhnev, an old orthodox guy maybe in a better
suit.

And our intelligence about Gorbachev in those early years was way behind the
curve. And this is an important lesson for Iran. When we see that the Iranians
are building a new nuclear enrichment facility, what do we really know about
what they're thinking? So the second lesson is you need really good
intelligence, you need to know what your enemy is thinking.

GROSS: David Hoffman, I really want to thank you for talking with us. I really
appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Mr. HOFFMAN: My pleasure.

GROSS: David Hoffman's book is called "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the
Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy." Our interview was recorded in
October.

On March 1st, President Obama will submit to Congress the Nuclear Posture
Review, a review of nuclear forces, strategy and readiness.

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Ted Conover's book "The Routes of Man: How
Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today." This is FRESH AIR.
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On The Roads: The Cartography Of Us

TERRY GROSS, host:

Writer Ted Conover says that road trips have always been an important part of
his life. In his new book he writes: Every road is a story of striving for
profit, for victory in battle, for discovery and adventure, for survival and
growth, or simply for livability. His new book is called "The Routes of Man:
How Roads Are Changing the Way We Live Today."

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Sometimes the gods indulge their weakness for literary irony
writ large. There I was, reading Ted Conover's new book about the roadways that
are reshaping life in six locales around the world, just as the all the roads
around my house began to vanish in a cosmic whiteout. It's been Snowpocalypse
here in Washington, D.C. — a rare one-two punch of storms that have frozen the
city to a standstill. Given that the only escape routes from my neighborhood
are the rudimentary paths created by shovels, boots and paw prints, Conover's
account seems to be the only road trip likely to be available to me until the
spring thaw.

And that vivid armchair travel aspect of Conover's book is undeniably a great
part of its appeal. His book is called "The Routes of Man." Routes is spelled
r-o-u-t-e-s. Get it? The mildly clever but phallocentric title is telling: This
is definitely a boy book. If you sign on for the ride here, you enter a road
warrior universe which is pretty much all male. In traditional extreme
adventure tale fashion, think "The Perfect Storm" or "Into Thin Air," Conover
tests his endurance by bouncing along atop fuel tankers through the Peruvian
rainforest and in the cabs of semi trucks across Kenya. He hikes a frozen river
in the Himalayas, braves roadside checkpoints on the West Bank, and, in Lagos,
Nigeria, rides shotgun with an ambulance crew through the blasted overpasses of
what's been projected to be the fastest-growing megacity on the planet.

Women are, at best, relegated to the passenger seat on Conover's trips. Danica
Patrick, Thelma and Louise, even Nancy Drew in her immortal blue roadster —
it's as though these path-breathing American women behind the wheel have left
only the faintest imprints on high-testosterone highways elsewhere on the
globe.

Beyond implicitly confirming that the freedom to burn fossil fuel — however
risky the trip — is a feminist issue worth fighting for, there's a larger
dimension to Conover's book. Conover thoughtfully investigates how roads,
especially in rapidly changing countries, are contested boundary lines where
the demands of the environment, traditional cultures, educational opportunity,
and industrial progress collide. Returning to Kenya, which he first visited as
a reporter in 1992, Conover reassesses the toll that AIDS has taken on that
country and reconsiders the theory that long-distance truckers, sleeping with
prostitutes along the Kinshasa Highway and other heavily traveled routes,
spread the disease between Central Africa and the continent's east coast.
Conover is shaken to discover that out of the 12 young truckers he got to know
on his first trip, six have died.

He says: If not for the links to the outside, the virus might have stayed put.
This is a cost of global connectivity. The same trucks that carry medicine in
may carry all manner of germs out.

Not all the roads in Conover's book, however, are strewn with desperate
stories. The most comically eye-opening chapter here is devoted to China's love
affair with cars. Conover joins up with one of the many self-driving clubs that
have sprung up in Chinese cities and embarks on a seven-day road tour with a
caravan of proud car owners who drive just for pleasure. Bedecked with club
decals, the 11 vehicles zoom off down the highway, their drivers happily
listening to CDs with titles like "The Relax Music of Automobiles."

Conover concludes: It is reminiscent of a fading romance in American life, this
crush on the automobile. Lord only knows where it all could be headed in terms
of congestion and pollution. It is hard not to predict a slow-motion, multicar
pileup in China's future. But it felt unfair to raise those issues in the
presence of the self-driving club members. They were out to have fun, the kind
we've already had. Who are we to say they can't?

Conover may be overly-sympathetic to the siren call of the road, but in "The
Routes of Man" he proves to be a discerning map reader of its global meanings
and meanderings.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed "The Routes of Man" by Ted Conover.

You can download podcasts of our show on our Web site, freshair.npr.org. And
you can follow us on Twitter and friend us on Facebook at nprfreshair.
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