Well, this is a tad creepifyin’:
Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
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. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.
It was a technically clever system that would launch retaliatory nuclear strikes in the event that nuclear detonations were detected in Soviet territory and communications with command and control were lost. But as a deterrent, it was useless, since the Soviets never told anyone they had it. And of course, it was an automated system, and sometimes such systems decide to, for example, fly Airbus jetliners into forests. So the future of life on Earth was put into the hands of a computer system built by Socialist slave laborers.
And here’s the good part: it’s still on.
Here are some fun sci-fi story ideas:
1) A comet or asteroid hits Russia, and as a result Dead Hand wipes out the rest of the planet.
2) Someone in the Russian military decides to go rogue, hijacks the Dead Hand system and convinces it to go off.
3) Some jackass teenage kid in the Pacific Northwest is hacking the web looking to download as-yet unreleased games, and comes across a Russian server hosting “Dead Hand: Global thermonuclear War” and decides to give it a try.
4) Skynet.
5) Some mid-80’s piece of electonic hardware decides to give out and explode, causing the system to go off.
6) The Iranians finally get nukes, and not only lob a nuke over the US, setting off an EMP that reduces the US to stone-age subsistence, they do the same to the Russians a few weeks later when the Russians try to become the big badass on the block now that the US is out of the picture. The EMP sets off Dead Hand. The last scene is the President of the US on his knees begging for his life saying something like “But I was the good guy! I was nice to them!” as his own Secret Service agents cap him… and then the Russian citybuster goes off in the yard outside.
7) The Chinese nuke the Russians, and as a result, the Russians nuke the US.
