Reddit reviews The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

A lot of fiction in this thread, I'd like to mention some non-fiction:

1. The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB by Milton Bearden and James Risen - Excellent story of the CIA and KGB from early 80s through the fall of the Soviet Union. Really covers in depth US operations inside the Soviet Union, important defections by senior Soviet military and intelligence personnel, and significant counterintelligence failures (Aldrich Ames). The best part is this is not a history review written by some academic third party, it was written by the guy who actually worked Moscow Station for the CIA during the period and knew Ames and handled many key defections. Moreover it contains a lot of detail on actual tradecraft methods.
   
   
2. The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman. This book really goes in depth on the Soviet chemical, biological, and radiological program, as well as the effort towards disarmament. What the Soviets dreamed up was actually quite frightening and they did much of it despite treat obligations. This book is interesting for two reasons: 1) The Soviets (And as conveyed by Phillip and Elizabeth in the Americans) really believed Reagan was a nut whom wanted to leave them on the ash heap of history, which drove their paranoia and pursuit of WMD; 2) It shows behind the scenes that Reagan actually wanted to reduce nuclear weapons and loathed the idea of nuclear war. A significant portion of the book focuses on the impact of key Soviet defectors that provided the US insight in to the Soviet WMD program.
   
   
3. Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century - Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud. Farewell was the code name for Vladimir Vetrov, a Soviet KGB Line X (Just like Oleg), whom was responsible for conducting S&T collection operations against the US. He became an agent for the French, and turned over heaps of information on Soviet S&T intelligence objectives and operations worldwide. His intelligence was passed on to the UK and US, and was important to Reagan in negotiations with the Soviet Union. His betrayal caused 100+ Soviet S&T intelligence officers to be expelled from US, the UK, and France. Excellent discussion on the motivation of an agent and stresses at maintaining two lives (Vetrov, in addition to working for the French, was also cheating on his wife... talk about stressful). Also a lot of interesting information on tradecraft such as signals for meetings and dead drops.

> The most revolutionary thing is to "Trust but Verify", as GamerGate has popularized as a social concept.

Fun fact the "trust but verify" originated apparently in Russia and Gorbachev introduced it to Reagan during their initial attempt of nuclear disarmament talks. It apparently became a favourite of Reagan and he kept using it a lot. Source