Table Of ContentThe Gun
Simon & Schuster
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Copyright © 2010 by C. J. Chivers All rights reserved, including the right to
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Designed by Kyoko Watanabe Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chivers, C. J.
The gun / C. J. Chivers— 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. AK-47 rifle—History. 2. War—History. 3. Machine guns—
Technological innovations—History. 4. Firearms—Technological innovations—
History. I. Title.
UD395.A16C47 2010
623.4'424—dc22 2010020459
ISBN 978-0-7432-7076-2
ISBN 978-1-4391-9653-3 (ebook)
For Natalya K. Estemirova
Bezstrashnaya Natasha
Fearless Natasha
The Investigator
Murdered for her work in Chechnya
An Example for All
February 28, 1958–July 15, 2009
“Inventors seldom benefit themselves. They benefit the people.”
—Richard J. Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Stalin’s Tools of War
I. ORIGINS
1. The Birth of Machine Guns
2. Machine Guns in Action
3. Hiram Maxim Changes War
4. Slaughter Made Industrial: The Great War
II. INVENTION AND DISTRIBUTION
5. Stalin’s Contest: The Invention of the AK-47
6. The Breakout: The Mass Production, Distribution, and Early Use of the
AK-47
III. AFTERMATH: THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE AK-47’S
GLOBAL SPREAD
7. The Accidental Rifle
8. Everyman’s Gun
EPILOGUE: The Twenty-first Century’s Rifle
A NOTE ABOUT THE M-16 SERIES OF RIFLES IN 2010
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
THE GUN
PROLOGUE
Stalin’s Tools of War
Outside an Institute Known by a Codeword, Nadezhda, on the Steppe in the
Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic
The atomic bomb rested on a tower one hundred feet above the ground. Known
as RDS-1, it was shaped like a huge metal teardrop with rivets and bolts along its
sides. Everything had been prepared. Inside its shell was a uranium and
plutonium charge equal to about twenty kilotons of TNT, making it a rough
equivalent to the weapon the United States had used to destroy Nagasaki four
years before. In the hours after midnight the scientists had departed, and now,
shortly before dawn on August 29, 1949, they gathered at their instruments in a
control bunker more than six miles away, where they were watched by Lavrenty
Beria, chief of Stalin’s secret police. Detonation was set for 6:00 A.M. The Soviet
Union was moments from entering the atomic age—ending the American
monopoly in atomic arms, securing the Kremlin’s status atop a global
superpower, and giving the Cold War its sense of doomsday menace. This was a
decade after the purges, two decades after the brutalities of collectivization, and
in a postwar period in which German prisoners of war were used as forced labor
and captured Soviet soldiers returned from German camps had been
interrogated, incarcerated, and, sometimes, put to death. Beria’s methods of
pursuing Stalin’s will were well-known. The lead physicist, Igor V. Kurchatov,
and his team were anxious. If the bomb did not work, some of these scientists
expected to be shot.
The test range, on an arid basin northwest of Semipalatinsk, a frontier city
where Russians had been sent to exile since czarist times, was a methodically
assembled period piece. Soviet soldiers and laborers had built it at a pace a
dictator could muster. The anticipated detonation site had been divided into
sectors. Within each, work cadres had erected structures and placed objects in
common military and civilian use: a railway bridge, buildings of various
dimensions and design, automobiles, concrete bunkers, aircraft, artillery pieces,
armored vehicles, tanks. Live animals had been tethered throughout, some
unprotected and others within buildings or vehicles, to determine how an atomic
explosion’s shock wave, heat, and radiation might affect live tissue at various
distances and in various states of exposure and protection. Pigs had been
Description:At a secret arms-design contest in Stalin’s Soviet Union, army technicians submitted a stubby rifle with a curved magazine. Dubbed the AK-47, it was selected as the Eastern Bloc’s standard arm. Scoffed at in the Pentagon as crude and unimpressive, it was in fact a breakthrough—a compact automa
