The Gun

1. Drawn from the author’s visit in 2004 to the test site and crater where RDS-1 was detonated, and interviews with the director of the National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan, which is located on the grounds of the former Soviet institute, and the center’s museum director and staff. Also from David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 213–20.

2. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 213–20.

3. Interview with author, 2004.

4. Gene Roberts, “Enemy’s Soviet-Designed Rifle Slows Marines’ Drive in Hue. AK-47 Makes Sniper a ‘Machine Gunner’ Who ‘Can Tie Up an Entire Company’—Cannons Used to Root Out Foe,” New York Times, February 9, 1968.

5. Interview in 2002 of Ashrat Khan by author.

6. Interview in 2010 of retired general William M. Keys, president and chief executive officer of Colt Defense LLC, the principal manufacturer of the M-16 line. Colt had manufactured roughly 7 million M-16s and seven hundred thousand M-4 carbines. The weapon and its knock-offs have also been made in smaller quantities in several other factories in Singapore, Canada, and South Korea, by a division of General Motors and elsewhere in the United States.

7. Marius Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians, and Their War (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. xiv–xv.

8. A useful and accurate English-language guide is Joseph Poyer, Kalashnikov Rifles and Their Variations (Tustin, Cal.: North Cape Publications, 2004), which expands upon the aggregation done by Edward Ezell’s Kalashnikov: The Arms and the Man (Cobourg, Ontario: Collector Grade Publications, 2001).

1. The Birth of Machine Guns

1. E. Frank Stephenson, Jr., Gatling: A Photographic Remembrance (Murfreesboro, North Carolina: Meherrin River Press, 1993), p. 4.

2. “Death of Dr. Gatling, Former Indianapolitan Who Achieved World-Wide Fame, Inventor of the Gatling Gun, Grain Drill and Other Devices Which Have Benefited Many,” in Gatling’s obituary on February 27, 1903, in the Indianapolis Journal, his impression from the caskets was quoted from an earlier interview. “The losses of life by disease rather than wounds caused me as a physician the idea that to shorten war would be to ameliorate it. This idea I got from looking at the boxes of dead bodies in the Indianapolis depot. I conceived a gun which should do the greatest execution in a brief space, by a revolving series of barrels loaded with a particular ammunition and shooting a double range.”

3. This letter from Gatling to Miss Lizzie Jarvis on June 15, 1877, is cited in many books, including on page 27 of Julia Keller’s Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun that Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It (New York: Penguin, 2008).

4. Stephenson, Gatling, p. 10.

5. From a letter by Hugh O. Pentecost, Gatling’s son-in-law, to the editors of the Hartford Courant, March 2, 1903. In Stephenson, Gatling, p. 81.

6. “Made The Gatling Gun. Inventor Sought to Decrease the Horrors of War. An Interview with Dr. Gatling,” Washington Post, October 29, 1899.

7. Frink’s role has not been widely documented. He is mentioned by Dr. Charles A. Bonsett in “Medical Museum Notes,” a column in the December 1988 issue of Indiana Medicine. Dr. Bonsett cited a 1914 article about Gatling that described Frink as a “mechanical genius of this city [Indianapolis].” Personal communication to author from Charles Bonsett. Charles A. Bonsett, “Medical Museum Notes,” from Indiana Medicine, December 1988, Vol. 81, No. 12. See also Fred D. Cavinder, Amazing Tales from Indiana (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 36.

8. From United States Patent No. 36,836, “Improvement in Revolving Battery Guns,” awarded to Richard J. Gatling, November 4, 1862, by the United States Patent Office, p. 1.

9. A. Bouvieron, An Historical and Biographical Sketch of Fieschi, with Anecdotes Relating to His Life (London, 1835), p. 68. The dimensions were taken from the report of M. LePage, gunsmith to the king, who examined the device.

10. A copy of the patent submission is reproduced in George M. Chinn, The Machine Gun: History, Evolution, and Development of Manual, Automatic, and Airborne Repeating Weapons, Volume I (Washington: Bureau of Ordnance, 1951), p. 18.

11. “A New System of Artillery for Projecting a Group or Cluster of Shot,” lecture presented to the Royal United Services Institute on May 9, 1862, and published in the institute’s journal the following year, p. 377.

12. Chinn, The Machine Gun, p. 36.

13. The term was used in 1914 by Dr. Charles Dennis, a medical beat writer for the Indianapolis Star, writing under the pen name Dr. Oldfish.

14. Indianapolis Daily Journal, May 30, 1862.

15. From “On Mitrailleurs, And Their Place In The Wars Of The Future,” by Major G. V. Fosbery, Her Majesty’s Bengal Staff Corps, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 1870, p. 543.

16. Charles B. Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms: A Description of Late Inventions Including the Gatling Gun and a Chapter on Cartridges (New York: F. W. Christern, 1872), p. 240.

17. Lieutenant Skerrett’s letter to Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, chief of the Navy’s ordnance bureau, is printed in full in Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms, p. 241.

18. From Joseph Allen Minturn, The Inventor’s Friend; or, Success With Patents: A Practical Book Telling How to Discriminate Between Valuable and Worthless Inventions; How to Avoid Mistakes and Disappointment; How to Patent and Protect Inventions, and How to Dispose of the Monopoly (Indianapolis: Meridian Co., 1893), p. 83.

19. Butler, who was nicknamed the Beast by the Confederacy, would become even more hated during Reconstruction. But long before that he was loathed. His military skills were virtually nonexistent. Volume II of History of North Carolina from the Earliest Discoveries to the Present Time, by John W. Moore, 1880, summarized his reputation on p. 261: “Such had been his conduct that the Confederate government had, by proclamation, set a price upon his head and instructed its armies to show him no quarter, but slay him like a wild beast wherever captured.”

20. Lieutenant W. W. Kimball, “Machine Guns,” published in Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, November 16, 1881, p. 407. Lt. Kimball did not cite his source for this information, and historians of the Civil War have largely concluded that the Gatling gun was not widely used in the war.

21. Paul Wahl and Don Toppel, The Gatling Gun (New York: Arco Publishing Co., 1965).

22. Louis M. Starr, Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action (New York: Knopf, 1954), pp. 222–24.

23. General Ripley presents historians with a curious case. The nemesis of would-be arms dealers to the Union, he has been derided by many of Gatling’s chroniclers as a small-minded officer who missed an opportunity to field a decisive weapon against the Confederacy. Interestingly, he also resisted the introduction of repeating rifles, missing another chance to equip his army with more lethal arms. He is, in this portrait, petty, unimaginative, inclined toward bureaucracy, and unresponsive. Ripley had a singularly difficult job. He needed to sort through the issues of arming a force that swelled severalfold within months, all the while puzzling through ways to keep the weapons flowing into service compatible with one another, and managing the weapons’ disparate ammunition needs and soldiers’ training. John Ellis, in his acidic treatise, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), called him “an inveterate standardiser.” Given