Dead Hand

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman, Anchor Books, 2010. 

Treaty

The U.S.A. and Soviet Union signed a Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention treaty outlawing biological weapons, which the Americans abided by, but the Soviets did not.  

Accidents

There was an accidental pulmonary anthrax exposure to the local population of weaponized anthrax bacteria in April 1979 in Sverdlovsk, a city of one million people. Afterwords, the Soviet germ warfare program was relocated to a more isolated place, Stepnogorsk. There was also a large nuclear waste accident in 1957 at Chelyabinsk-40 near Kyshtym, which they revealed only after the end of the Cold War. 

The Dead Hand and Perimeter

The Soviets considered buildings fully automated system that would launch nuclear weapons against the United States. Even if all humans in the Soviet chain of command died, it would still launch a counterattack. It was called the “Dead Hand”. They never actually built it. Instead, they built a semi-automated system, called Perimeter. Perimeter went live in 1985. 

Removing Nuclear Material

In 1994 the United States helped Russia with removing Thirteen hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan. This effort was named Project Sapphire. Three C5 aircraft were used to move the material to the U.S.

Mikhail Gorbachev

After the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev made a good effort to reveal Soviet lies regarding weapons systems. However, there were many secrets that even Gorbachev did not know, plus Gorbachev withheld a few secrets. Many of the Soviet military and weapons officials and scientists wanted to continue lying to the West. The book also describes the meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland, to eliminate all nuclear weapons. 

Spies and Defections

Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer, spied for the British. He let the West know that the Soviets had a paranoid fear of the Americans launching a first strike against the U.S.S.R. Vladimir Pasechnik, director of the Institute of UltraPure Biological Preparations in Leningrad, defected to Britain in 1989.  Ken Alibek, an ethnic Kazakh and first deputy director of the Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological weapons program, emigrated to the U.S. in 1992.