C.J. Chivers, The Gun.
No one would have predicted, as the world worried over nuclear war, that these rifles, with their cartridges of reduced size, would become the most lethal instrument of the Cold War. Unlike the nuclear arsenals and the infrastructure that would rise around them—the warheads, the mobile launchers, the strategic bombers and submarines—an automatic rifle was a weapon that could actually be used. And none of the Cold War’s seemingly infinite and fantastic array of killing tools could more readily slip from state control. In this way, 1949 became the year of a mismatched but fated pair, RDS-1 and the AK-47, whose descendants were to work in consonance and shape the conflicts ahead. The nuclear umbrella froze borders in place and discouraged all-out war between the conventional armies stacked in Europe, helping to create conditions in which the Kalashnikov percolated from continent to continent, nation to nation, group to group, man to man, maturing as its numbers grew and its reputation spread into the age’s dominant tool for violence in conflict zones. At first the distribution was piecemeal and incremental; gradually, it became almost unchecked. By the early 1960s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had startled its participants and as the war in Vietnam was expanding and quickening, the Kremlin and the White House comprehended that their nuclear arsenals had made total war unwinnable. Small wars and proxies would be the means through which the Cold War would be fought.
The Kalashnikov era had arrived.
We are living in it still.
"C.J. Chivers, The Gun.
I’m not even through the preface of this, but it’s already great. The AK-47 is the most terrifyingly mundane weapon in the world, so easy that children can—and do, every day—use it, and so well-made that Soviet testers actually had problems making it jam up in their labs. It was this single rifle that secured a steady stream of human-rights abuses and never-ending low-grade, asymmetric warfare all around the world, from Los Angeles’ ganglands to Africa’s dictatorial conflicts.
NYT correspondent C.J. Chivers has a new book out about the ubiquitous AK-47, which, as he points out, is “one of the world’s most recognizable objects”:
As the rifles have moved about the world, they have been appropriated by all manner of combatants to have all manner of meanings. The…
I have been seeing reviews for this in lots of places: Wired, The Wall Street Journal…I really need to read this. I find the AK-47’s proliferation morbidly interesting. People worry about nuclear arms; we never worry about the fact that anyone can buy one of these rifles on the international arms market for about two-hundred bucks, including expedited shipping.
The thing I like from what I’ve heard about Chivers’ book is that it isn’t really a straight history—the first part of the book, I think almost half, chronicles the development of increasingly-reliable machine guns prior to the AK—and it later illustrates the gun’s ubiquity in a series of episodes. The first insurgent group to use the gun, for example, were Hungarians revolting against the Soviet Union’s repression of their 1956 revolution; they found the rifles abandoned in Budapest, turning the weapon of their oppressor into their own. Even crazier is the fact that the United States is currently the world’s biggest purchaser of the rifle, issuing them in Afghanistan and Iraq almost like candy.
