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Wow. David Hoffman’s The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy<\/a> has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize<\/a> in the category of general nonfiction. To win in that catch-all category, it had to beat out works on such modest and inconsequential themes as the origins of financial catastrophe and the history of belief in the Almighty.<\/p>\n (John Lennon, wherever you are, eat your heart out.)<\/p>\n We’re actually living through the Golden Age of well-researched and highly readable nuclear- or WMD<\/span>-themed books. Bob Drogin’s Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused a War<\/a>, Michael Dobbs’s One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War<\/a>, and Mike Chinoy’s Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis<\/a> all rate a mention. I’m particularly fond of Curveball<\/em> and The Dead Hand,<\/em> but they should all be on your shelf.<\/p>\n (Here’s where I confess that I simply haven’t gotten to Richard Rhodes’s Arsenals of Folly<\/a> yet. It’s on the list, OK?)<\/p>\n Between these guys and Hoffman, you’ll notice there are three (ex-)newspapermen with some time on their hands, so yes, there is a silver lining to the harrowing of the papers at the hands of the Internet. But never mind. Hoffman, for one, is on a roll these days, producing an outpouring of articles at foreignpolicy.com that frame current events through little-known episodes from the Cold War and its aftermath — testimony to the sort of intellectual capital one builds up by spending years researching a book. Here’s his latest, on the significance of the fissile material cleanout<\/a> plan. This past Sunday, too, he had an op-ed in the Post<\/em> on counterforce and overkill<\/a>, plus a news story about the recent removal of HEU<\/span> from Chile<\/a>. The guy keeps busy.<\/p>\n Congratulations, David!<\/p>\n Wow. David Hoffman’s The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in the category of general nonfiction. To win in that catch-all category, it had to beat out works on such modest and inconsequential themes as the origins of financial catastrophe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3965,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-525596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3965"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"