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 automatic that could be mastered by almost anyone, last decades in the field, and would rarely jam. Manufactured by tens of millions in planned economies, it became first an instrument of repression and then the most lethal weapon of the Cold War. Soon it was in the hands of terrorists.
Prologue: Stalin’s Tools of War
Chapter 1: The Birth of Machine Guns
Chapter 2: Machine Guns in Action
Chapter 3: Hiram Maxim Changes War
Chapter 4: Slaughter Made Industrial: The Great War
Chapter 5: Stalin’s Contest: The Invention of the AK-47
Chapter 6: The Breakout: The Mass Production, Distribution, and Early Use of the AK-47
Chapter 7: The Accidental Rifle
Epilogue: The Twenty-first Century’s Rifle
THE IDEA OF CONCENTRATED FIREPOWER, MINIATURIZED AND MASS-PRODUCED