The Gun by C. J. Chivers Page B

Communist Party formally attributed the weapon’s design. The number was shorthand for 1947, the year a technical bureau in Kovrov, a city east of Moscow with its own hidden arms plants, had finished the prototypes. In the time since, factories in Izhevsk had been tooled up to produce it. Within twenty-five years it would be the most abundant firearm the world had known.
    During this time, the American intelligence community would fixate, understandably and properly, on the Soviet Union’s nuclear programs. The activities in Izhevsk would be missed. As the mushroom cloud towered over the Kazakh steppe, no one noticed the arrival of Stalin’s new firearm. No one would pay much mind as these rifle plants, and others across the Eastern bloc and in nations aligned with the Soviet Union or the socialist ideal, would ship off their automatic rifles by the untold millions during the years ahead. And 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 bombersand 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 mutual 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.
    This book focuses on the most important series of infantry small arms of our time, and as most commonly encountered in the field: the original AK-47 and its derivates, knockoffs, and companion firearms that have flooded armories and arms bazaars around the world and become a primary weapon of guerrillas, terrorists, and many armed criminal gangs. It examines their origins, design, production, distribution, stockpiling, export, and use as one of the predominant tools of war of the past half-century—a status they are likely to retain for at least a half-century more. But this is not an account solely of a weapon’s ubiquity on the battlefield. Nor is it a treatment of the AK-47 only for the sake of examining the AK-47. That is not to say that the Kalashnikov line by itself is not an expansive and interesting subject; it is. But a richer context is essential. These weapons occupy a place in history beyond the questions of when, where, and how they have been manufactured and used. The significance of the automatic Kalashnikov lies deeper than its origins in Stalin’s Soviet Union, its technical utility as a killing tool, its famed reliability and ease ofuse, the awesome size of its number or the multiplicity of its meanings—though these themes are all essential.
    The richer context is this: The automatic Kalashnikov offers a lens for examining the miniaturization and simplification of rapid-fire firearms, a set of processes that when uncoupled from free markets and linked to mass production in the