15
How Stalin died is a matter of historical dispute. Beria, according to Vyacheslav Molotov, a member of the inner circle, boasted of dispatching the dictator with rat poison.
16
All the Warsaw Pact nations except Czechoslovakia would adopt the Kalashnikov system as their standard rifles, and often as police weapons, too; and would subsidize plants producing large numbers of Kalashnikov knockoffs. Albania, however, would not receive its technical aid for production from the Soviet Union. China would provide that assistance.
17
A Colt .38-caliber revolver, a Luger 9-millimeter, a Colt .45-caliber revolver, and more.
18
Fabrique-Nationale de Herstal, a Belgian firearms manufacturer.
19
The Type 56 assault rifle, the clone of the AK-47 made in Mao’s China since the Soviet army passed the technical specifications to the People’s Liberation Army in the mid-1950s.
20
The available data, compiled in the database of the Wound Data and Munitions Effectiveness Team, or WDMET, showed that 51 percent of American combat fatalities in Vietnam during the period under study were caused by small arms, 36 percent by fragmentation munitions, and 11 percent by mines and booby traps. From Ronald F. Bellamy and Russ Zajtchuk, Textbook of Military Medicine. Part I. Warfare, Weaponry and the Casualty. Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast and Burn Injuries, Chapter 2, Assessing the Effectiveness of Conventional Weapons (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, 1989), p. 65.
21
The new name brought the rifle into line with the military’s standard designations. M stood for model; thus the M1903 Springfield, the M1 Garand, the M-14, etc.
22
A lock was installed on most M-14s to prevent them from being used on automatic fire. In every ten-man rifle squad in the army in the early 1960s, two men were given the M-14 capable of automatic fire, known as the M- 14E2; this version was equipped with a bipod and other features that drove up its weight.
23
Under the license sale arrangement, MacDonald would receive a cut of both Fairchild’s and Colt’s future receipts. This included a 1 percent commission from Colt’s for the selling price of every rifle sold, and 10 percent of Fairchild royalties, some of which were calculated on a sliding scale. For sales to military customers, the combined formula guaranteed him 1.225 percent. These were considerable incentives for MacDonald to try to have the AR-15 adopted by the American military. (For a detailed review of the license deal, see ‘How a Lone Inventor’s Idea Took Fire,’ Business Week, July 6, 1968.)
24
The embarrassment had grounds beyond the origins of the cadavers used. The twenty-seven severed heads were ultimately subjected to tests of little apparent value. And there are hints in the report of a lapse of scientific judgment that cast doubts on the value of the entire study. According to the report, Dziemian and Olivier used AR- 15 ammunition different from the ammunition the American military used in Vietnam. Throughout the war, American troops would use a metal-jacketed round, just as the military had been using in other cartridges throughout the century. But in the Biophysics Division’s test in 1962, the cartridges were described by Dziemian and Olivier as propelling ‘bullets with a lead core and no metal jackets.’ These rounds could be expected to create wounds of a much different nature from those made by military ammunition, and their use in the tests risked undermining judgment about the relative lethality of the tested weapons. But there is a hurdle to knowing with certainty what really occurred: the secrecy and cover-up of the work. Was the reference a clerical error? The photographs of the ammunition released to the author by the United States government were low-quality digital scans and provided no help in determining the bullets’ composition. Ultimately, it is not possible to tell from the records released to date. The study’s final report did have other clerical errors, so it remains possible that this, too, was a clerical error. This was one of the pitfalls of secret tests, which were subject neither to peer review nor to public scrutiny. Both research lapses and editorial lapses could pass, and did pass, unchallenged.
25
Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which fought with American forces against the North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerrillas (
