The mid-1940s saw the invention of the most destructive weapon mankind has ever seen. The atom bomb may have been the one that had us sleeping uneasy in our beds - but it was the AK that really did the damage. Six decades on, the worldwide body count this deadly antique has chalked up is incalculable. It keeps rising. It's not a subtle creature - it sprays 650 rounds a minute, and its rough bullets tumble devastatingly through human flesh - but Mikhail Kalashnikov's brilliant design is cheap to make, astonishingly durable, and will fire even if soaking wet, full of sand or caked in mud. A child could use one. Thousands do.
AK47 - the Story of the People's Gun (Sceptre, £16.99), Michael Hodges's droll and horrifying account of its history - as Red Army mainstay; victor in Vietnam; icon of armed resistance in the Middle East; scourge of sub-Saharan Africa; badge of gang credibility in the American ghetto - is necessarily selective, but it is shrewdly selective and exceptionally engrossing. He is especially good on the iconography of the AK and the
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power of its myth. A Vietcong soldier became a hero after he was claimed to have shot down an American plane with his AK; the profile of the gun is incorporated into the flags and banners of insurgencies. It's no accident that video messages from that shrewd iconographer Osama Bin Laden invariably feature one.
If Hodges's book has a weakness, it is that he is himself occasionally hypnotised (as perhaps he has to be for the sake of his thesis) by the myth. Like the photographer he meets in Arab east Jerusalem who becomes obsessed with taking photographs of the gun, he seems to accord the AK a sinister will of its own - almost to suggest that the gun itself foments the conflicts in which it is involved.
That's to go too far. As the Goldie Lookin' Chain teach us: "Guns don't kill people. Rappers do." 
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FIRST POSTED JUNE 21, 2007
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