New books: nukes, Russia and the secrets of 1989

Lots to read this fall. Here are three new books:

The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (PublicAffairs)
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
The authors bring hard-digging, fact-based journalism to an aspect of Russia that has been hard to document and understand. The New Nobility shows how Vladimir Putin expanded the reach and resources of the successors to the Soviet KGB, and examines their performance as a new elite. The book raises plenty of questions about why the services have not been more successful at security in an age of terrorism, given their favored status, with revealing chapters on the Nord Ost theatre siege, and the Beslan school massacre. They also document the use of the security services to pursue scientists and opposition political figures. A surprising chapter is the story of the hidden underground subway system, which has its own security service. Borogan recalls going down through a ventilator shaft — a good metaphor for their deep dive into this murky world. They come back to the surface with a book that is sober and probing. (Full disclosure: I gave the authors some editing advice.)

The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (Knopf)
By Richard Rhodes
Rhodes set the gold standard for nuclear history with The Making of the Atomic Bomb almost 25 years ago. In his latest volume, he examines what happened to nuclear weapons after the Cold War by looking not so much at Russia, but elsewhere around the globe. There is a strong focus on Iraq, where Rhodes chronicles the efforts to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program in the 1990s, and then explains how the intelligence about WMD was so badly exaggerated leading up to the war in 2003. It is an important story that’s been told before, but Rhodes injects a fresh sense of outrage. He also offers intriguing and contrasting accounts of nuclear decision-making in South Africa and North Korea, chapters relevant to today’s proliferation conundrums. At the start of the book, Rhodes says he set out to understand “how the dangerous post-Cold War nuclear transition was managed, who its heroes were, what we learned from it, and where it carried us.” While the title suggests dusk of the atomic age, the book is actually a reminder that we have not come close to the twilight of the bombs.

Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of The Cold War in Europe (Central European University Press; another in the Cold War reader series of The National Security Archive.)
Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok, eds.
This book is the kind that you can open at any page for an instant immersion in one of the most critical years of the last century, 1989, when the Cold War ended in Europe. The “masterpieces” of the title are 122 original documents which tell the story in words as they were actually spoken and written. The documents make great reading, especially the transcripts of Mikhail Gorbachev’s conversations with European leaders. The volume also contains key diplomatic cables, including Ambassador Jack Matlock’s perceptive three-part cable from Moscow on the future of the Soviet Union in February; Soviet Politburo transcripts; CIA estimates; and diary entries. All are accompanied by explanatory introductions. The book offers astute and enlightening essays by the editors, and the transcript of the 1998 Musgrove conference, a retrospective on the end of the Cold War. On any reference shelf, this one will be pulled down often, again and again.