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The Return of the Doomsday Machine?Please don't count on me to save the world again.

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Friday, Aug. 31, 2007, at 3:52 PM ET

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Up until Aug. 10 of this year, I would have thought these questions were best consigned to the realm of apocalyptic film fantasy. But on that day I came upon a startling essay in the London Times Literary Supplement. It was a review (titled "Deadly Devices") of a book recently published in the United Kingdom: Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by nuclear-age historian P.D. Smith of University College London. (It will be out in the United States in December.)

The TLS reviewer, Christopher Coker (who is on the faculty of the London School of Economics), asserted that the book demonstrates that "only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and ... the Cold War began to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the [doomsday] device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in 13 minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communication network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr. Strangelove. Its code name was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place."

Wait a minute. Still in place?! How is this possible?

In the endnotes of Smith's book (which turns out to be an illuminating portrait of the Doomsday weapon concept and its cultural implications), I found a reference to a further description of the Perimetr system in a 2003 Washington Post op-ed by Bruce G. Blair, the former Minuteman ICBM launch control officer who first revealed the existence of the program. (When he wrote the op-ed, he was a Brookings fellow; he is now head of the World Security Institute in Washington, a liberal think tank.)

The op-ed offers a far more detailed and chilling picture of Perimetr than the brief mention devoted to it in the book and review:

Die-hard [U.S.] nuclear war planners actually have their eyes on targets in Russia and China, including missile silos and leadership bunkers. For these planners, the Cold War never ended. Their top two candidates [i.e., targets] in Russia are located inside the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains in the central and southern Urals.
Both were huge construction projects begun in the late 1970s, when U.S. nuclear firepower took special aim at the Communist Party's leadership complex. Fearing a decapitating strike, the Soviets sent tens of thousands of workers to these remote sites, where U.S. spy satellites spotted them still toiling away in the late 1990s.

Blair sources his information on these command bunkers to "diagrams and notes given to me in the late 1990s by SAC [Strategic Air Command] senior officers," men in charge of targeting our missile and bomber forces.

From them, he paints a Strangelovian picture:

The Yamantau command center is inside a rock quartz mountain, about 3,000 feet straight down from the summit. It is a wartime relocation facility for the top Russian political leadership. It is more a shelter than a command post, because the facility's communications links are relatively fragile. As it turned out, the quartz interferes with radio signals broadcast from inside the mountain.

A quartz nuclear-war mountain! Something phantasmal about it, like a satanic big rock candy mountain. But the quartz mountain melts in comparison with the Perimetr dead-hand system at Kosvinsky.

"Kosvinsky," Blair tells us, "is regarded by U.S. targeteers as the crown jewel of the Russian wartime nuclear command system, because it can communicate through the granite mountain to far-flung Russian strategic forces using very-low-frequency (VLF) radio signals that can burn through a nuclear war environment. The facility is the critical link to Russia's 'dead hand' communications network, designed to ensure semi-automatic retaliation to a decapitating strike."

Of course, there's a world of difference between a "semi-automatic" doomsday device and the totally automatic—beyond human control—doomsday device in Strangelove, something that Blair is careful to note. The Soviet facility does require a human hand for the final fatal push of the button. But Blair believes that the human brain behind that hand has not been programmed to suddenly turn peacenik. And the details of the device are far from reassuring.

"This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984, during the height of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of creative engineering." According to Blair, if Perimetr senses a nuclear explosion in Russian territory and then receives no communication from Moscow, it will assume the incapacity of human leadership in Moscow or elsewhere, and will then grant a single human being deep within the Kosvinsky mountains the authority and capability to launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal.

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

Photograph of a nuclear bomb test by Digital Vision/Getty Creative.

COMMENTS

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.)

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