The Return of the Doomsday Machine?Please don't count on me to save the world again.
Posted Friday, Aug. 31, 2007, at 3:52 PM ET
"The nuclear doomsday machine." It's a Cold War term that has long seemed obsolete.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponAnd even back then, the "doomsday machine" was regarded as a scary conjectural fiction. Not impossible to create—the physics and mechanics of it were first spelled out by U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard—but never actually created, having a real existence only in such apocalyptic nightmares as Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system's sensors detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or (as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.
An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.
Instead, something was reactivated in Russia last week. I'm referring to the ominous announcement—given insufficient attention by most U.S. media (the Economist made it the opening of a lead editorial on Putin's Russia)—by Vladimir Putin that Russia has resumed regular "strategic flights" of nuclear bombers. (They may or may not be carrying nuclear bombs, but you can practically hear Putin's smirking tone as he says, "Our [nuclear bomber] pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.")
These twin developments raise a troubling question: What are the United States' and Russia's current nuclear policies with regard to how and when they will respond to a perceived nuclear attack? In most accounts, once the president or Russian premier receives radar warning of an attack, they have less than 15 minutes to decide whether the warning is valid. The pressure is on to "use it or lose it"—launch our missiles before they can be destroyed in their silos. Pressure that makes the wrong decision more likely. Pressure that makes accidental nuclear war a real possibility.
Once you start to poke into this matter, you discover a disturbing level of uncertainty, which leads me to believe we should be demanding that the United States and Russia define and defend their nuclear postures. Bush and Putin should be compelled to tell us just what "failsafe" provisions are installed on their respective nuclear bombers, missiles, and submarines—what the current provisions against warning malfunctions are and what kinds of controls there are over the ability of lone madman nuclear bombers to bring on the unhappy end of history.
As for the former Soviet Union, the possible existence of a version of a doomsday machine is both relevant and disturbing.
In the Strangelove film, the Soviet ambassador tells the president and generals in the U.S. war room that the device was designed to deter a surprise attack, the kind of attack that might otherwise prevent retaliation by "decapitating" the Soviet command structure. The automated system would insure massive world-destroying retaliation even if the entire Soviet leadership were wiped out—or had second thoughts. As a result, some referred to it as the "dead hand" doomsday device.
It is Dr. Strangelove himself, the madman U.S. nuclear strategist played by Peter Sellers, who detects the flaw in this plan. After being apprised of the system's existence by the Soviet ambassador, and the likelihood of its being triggered by a U.S. bomber on an unauthorized mission to nuke its Soviet target, Dr. Strangelove exclaims:
Yes, but the ... whole point of the doomsday machine ... is lost ... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
In other words, a doomsday machine kept secret is no good for deterrence, only for retaliation by extinction.
Did the Soviets actually design a variation on a doomsday device and not tell us about it? And could an accidental or terrorist nuclear attack on Putin's Russia (by Chechens, for instance) trigger an antiquated automated dead-hand system and launch missiles capable of killing tens, maybe hundreds, of millions at unknown targets that might include the United States?
The John Cassavetes Movie That Changed American Cinema Forever
Am I Wasting My Money if I Give to a Needy Family at Christmas?
Troy Patterson: What I Love About Glee
Hurray! We Won the War on Spam.
Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball Is a Crude, Fantastic Mess
Thanks, FDA, but We Don't Need Your Protection From Raw Oysters
Remarks from the Fray:
During the 50s, 60s and 70s, the clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reminded us of how close we were to a holocaust. The clock got as close as 2 minutes to midnight, after the H-bomb was developed, and has never been set earlier than 11:43 (in 1991, at the end of the Cold War).
Today, it sits at 11:55. This partly is because the Bulletin now considers other threats, including global warming, but most of the changes since 1991 have come because of proliferation and the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack. Even when the clock was set at 11:43, though, it recognized a substantial danger of catastrophe because of a mistake.
The real point of the clock is to remind us of the fragility and instability of our current world. Before the 1950s, it was inconceivable that people could do anything that would, in essence, end the world. Nuclear weapons made us realize that it was possible, perhaps even probable. And, oddly, that realization, along with works like Silent Spring, may have made it possible for us to understand longer-term threats, like global warming.
Of course, people react in different ways to the uncertainty of the modern world. Vladimir Putin and, I fear, some of our leaders, may think that security lies in making it dangerous for others to threaten you, rather than in making it more difficult to threaten others in the first place. These things seem to run in cycles, though, so perhaps cooler heads will prevail. I just hope it happens before the clock strikes twelve.
--randy-khan
(To reply, click here.)
I'm a little over thirty years old, which is old enough to remember going to sleep at night genuinely, legitimately worried that you might not wake up... because of that five-megaton airburst above a known target ten miles up the road.
When the Iron Curtain rusted apart, we celebrated, but not because we really gave much of a damn if the Czechs could elect a poet or the Germans could run Oktoberfest without that pesky wall through the middle. We cheered because we knew that something resembling a democratic government in Russia was much less likely to engage in global military chest-thumping which might trigger nuclear escalation. We could go to bed at night, not half-expecting the nuclear alarm-clock to wake us up.
Today I am... not really worried in the same way I was in my youth, but I can see the possibilities out there. If Russia under Yeltsin resembled a democratic government, Russia under Putin these days resembles a Soviet-style government-by-bureaucracy pretending (very badly) to resemble a democracy. It's not quite alarming yet, and if Putin really steps down as his second term ends there's a chance that the next leader will have the wisdom to step back, to build something better than the kleptocracy that Russia has become... and maybe Dubya will withdraw from Iraq before his second term ends.
Yeah, right.
Even a non-democratic Russia need not be our enemy, but it could become one in a real hurry, and my fear is that the utter inefficiencies in their joke of an economy will leave them permanently poor and resentful...and sitting on a legacy of nuclear weapons from the "glory years" of the previous era. The one positive is at least they lack the conventional military power to project enough force to make direct confrontation an inevitability. Soviet conventional strategy always emphasized quantity, but back in the day they were seldom more than a decade behind in technological terms. The Russian military today is a joke with a lot of badly-trained manpower and no credible way it can attack anyone (except with its nukes) who's not a next-door neighbor.
If we're not shooting at them or their immediate proxies, the Russians will never have adequate reason to push the button. Even the proverbial gung-ho military commander under the mountain with all of Russia's nuclear might at his fingertip will not be inclined to punish the US if it was the Chechens who did Moscow.
--ked
(To reply, click here.)
Do Aeschylus some justice: Cassandra's curse for failing to bear Apollo a child was to tell the truth but never to be believed. She foretells in gruesome detail the murder of Agamemnon, as she had foretold the fall of Troy, but she was not believed in either case.
In the Agamemnon, Cassandra gives her prophecy to the chorus, which can be understood to represent the common people of a nation. Had they believed her, or had they been more decisive, the murder of the king may have been prevented--but she was not, and they were not, and Agamemnon was axe-murdered in his bath by his not-so-loving wife. This is significant because it shows just how out-of-touch Mr. Rosenbaum's comparison is here: apart from being unfair to Cassandra, perpetrating her curse in the form of a shallow stereotype, he suggests that Blair is not a prophet telling truths to deaf ears, which runs counter to the rest of this piece.
--Joe M.
(To reply, click here.)
(9/2)