Christopher Andrew

Red Alert

The Dead Hand: Reagan, Gorbachev and the Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race

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Icon Books 577pp £20 order from our bookshop

The Dead Hand is the first non-religious book I can recall that is claimed by its British publishers to be ‘hugely revered’. Despite the overblown encomiums of Icon Books, however, this is an important, well-written volume that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the last decade of the Cold War and its aftermath.

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