'The Gun': The life story of a deadly weapon

THE GUN, by C.J. Chivers. Simon & Schuster, 481 pp, $28.It's plentiful, portable, durable and so simple that even a child can use one. It's the Avtomat Kalashnikova, or AK-47, the assault rifle that Joseph Stalin gave to the world and that long outlived the Cold War.

Named for the man credited with its invention, Mikhail Kalashnikov, and the year the Soviet Union adopted it, 1947, the AK-47 is an in-between weapon - lighter and shorter than previous infantry rifles, yet more accurate and powerful than a submachine gun. C.J. Chivers, in his exhaustive and bleak history "The Gun," concludes that the weapon will have a strong influence on armed conflict for decades to come.

The AK-47 had fewer moving parts than typical automatic rifles, and those parts were loose-fitting and massive, making a dirty gun less likely to jam. The Soviets gave these durable machines to just about anyone who might advance their goals and even helped their neighbors - including China - build their own AK factories. The world is awash in AKs and their progeny.

"These weapons began as a means to equip standing armies," Chivers writes. "But the nations that made them lost custody of them, and then control, and now in much of the world they are everyman's gun."

Small arms were the weapon of choice in 46 of 49 major conflicts in the 1990s, in which 4 million people died, Chivers says, citing a United Nations report. AKs and AK knockoffs were the primary rifles used.

Today, they appear on flags and as props in terrorist videos. U.S. Marines practice breaking down and reassembling them, "just in case." There's even a Kalashnikov Vodka.

Chivers, a New York Times foreign correspondent who served in the Marine Corps in the Gulf War, combines a soldier's experience with a historian's skepticism. You probably won't be able to trade a chicken for an AK, as is sometimes asserted, he says; one can be had for a few head of cattle. More telling, he shows how the price of an AK is a barometer of how dangerous a place has become.

His tale starts in the 1860s with inventor and businessman Richard Gatling and proceeds to Hiram Maxim, the sadist and possible trigamist, Chivers says, who developed one of the first viable automatic weapons.

When you fire a rifle, it recoils and releases a burst of gas. Automatic weapons harness that wasted energy to eject the spent cartridge and push back a bolt. The bolt then bounces off a spring and smashes into the next cartridge, setting the process in motion again. After Maxim, automatics grew smaller and deadlier, culminating in the abattoir that was World War I.

The life of Kalashnikov is obscured in Soviet secrecy and mendacity. He may have been the resourceful tinkerer of popular myth. Yet, according to Chivers, he also was the willing creature of a propaganda machine that gave him more credit than he deserved for the work of many hands.

Kalashnikov, who turned 91 last month, seeks credit when his gun is put to uses he likes - such as defending the motherland - and disavows responsibility for the destruction it causes elsewhere.

"I have always tried to knock down that annoying stereotype: If you are a weapons designer, you are a murderer," Chivers quotes him as saying.

Chivers contrasts the AK with the American-made M16, which, he says, was issued to U.S. troops in Vietnam before it was ready for jungle duty. It corroded and jammed, sometimes with fatal consequences. Some soldiers would abandon their M16s in favor of captured AKs. Though the American weapon has since been improved, the damage was done.

The greatest strength of "The Gun" lies in the stories told by rank-and-file gunfighters. Chivers devotes space to child soldiers in Uganda, Marines in Southeast Asia and Kurdish bodyguards in northern Iraq. One by one, they describe what it's like to shoot, and be shot by, this killing machine, a device that can unload hundreds of bullets in a minute.