Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
September 22nd, 2009Via: Wired:
Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.
“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.
Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it.
Closely guarded secret? Ha! Only if we forget that so-called closely guarded secrets regularly appear in well-researched science fiction stories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Cartmill
This sounds EXACTLY like the device described in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove movie. I’ll gladly wager that Kubrick had contacts who had contacts that gave him his ideas.
As I read this, I thought to myself “Is this
some kind of a joke?”. I mean, after all, this
device was clearly highlighted and played a
central role in Dr. Strangelove.
It was described more or less exactly as in
this article. I can think of at least two
choices:
1) Russians often have a far more wry sense
of humor than their American counterparts;
perhaps the old apparatchik is just
having some fun, and getting in print.
2) There is such a device.
In either case, it behooves us to remain,
if not friends, then friendly.
By the way, the Iron Gate has been there
forever. Nice place. Very private. I don’t
know what it’s like now, but it used
to be great food; then I got married, started
a family, and re-adjusted spending
priorities. Maybe I’ll stop by one of
these nights with the family for some
borsch and desinformatsiya.
Dr Strangelove rides again, yee-haw! So, another Tunguska happens and the Perimeter system mistakes it for a crippling nuke attack and triggers mass extermination of the species? Survivors emerging from their homes asking WTF was that big meteorite thing are annihilated in seconds by an ironic cold war leftover anachronism? Holy tritium Batman!
This Doomsday Machine was discussed in a class I took called Science and Technology in International Relations in 1995. The professor had been involved with the “Defense Establishment” for about 40 years. He described it as a “dead man’s switch.”
He also discussed cobalt jackets:
http://www.nypress.com/article-8119-cobalt-casings-and-other-heavy-things.html
I was about to graduate, and my focus had been on international security studies. I’d also had a sort of basic fascination in weapon systems since I was a kid. I’d never heard of cobalt casings before.
I asked the professor in class, “How do you know that someone hasn’t just fed you a line of BS about this? Maybe it’s just a myth to give the Russians something to think about?”
He said words to the effect: I hope that’s what it is.
But on a different occasion, there was a two star general giving some talk on strategic weapons in the post cold war era blah blah and I asked that guy what he could tell us about the cobalt jackets. HAHAAH. Well, he said, “I don’t know anything about that,” but you kinda had to be there to get the full effect of his denial.
Different but related: Salted Bomb:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb
There’s no shortage of madness out there.
After I saw what one drop of VX does to a rabbit, I just assumed that we were all living on borrowed time. (We were shown the VX-on-animal tests in that same class.)
By this time I was extremely cynical about these wasted university years. Much of what we had been taught was nonsense. Maybe these stories were too. Although, that stuff about the VX, unfortunately, was very real, despite my wanting to believe that it wasn’t.
See also…
The American Doomsday Machine
By Daniel Ellsberg
September 21, 2009
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/092109b.html
‘ In sum, 100 million more deaths, roughly, were predicted in East Europe. There might be an additional 100 million from fallout in West Europe, depending on which way the wind blew (a matter, largely, of the season).
Regardless of season, still another 100 million deaths, at least, were predicted from fallout in the mostly neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet bloc or China: Finland, Austria, Afghanistan, India, Japan and others. Finland, for example, would be wiped out by fallout from U.S. ground-burst explosions on the Soviet submarine pens at Leningrad.
(The total number of “casualties”—injured as well as killed—had not been requested and was not estimated; nor were casualties from any Soviet retaliatory strikes.)
The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts. ‘
etc.
“1) Russians often have a far more wry sense
of humor than their American counterparts;”
Until Peter the Great humans as slaves where a great export from Russia. Then it was seen as a source of raw materials by outsiders. Lots of invasions. Ww1, North Russia Campaign ww2, cold war 1979 Afghanistan, Chechnya and Georgia getting support shows the game goes on.