Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins

In a dreadful kind of irony Szilard came up with the notion of the doomsday machine in 1950 as a way of trying to shock the world into the real possibility of self-extinction. [153]He shocked fellow scientists when he actually broadcast a description of his fallout-intensive cobalt-jacketed arsenal of multiple hydrogen bomb devices on a University of Chicago radio program in February 1950 in which he said, according to a transcript obtained by P. D. Smith, “how many neutrons or how much heavy hydrogen do we have to detonate to kill everybody on earth?… I come up with about 50 tons of neutrons which is plenty.”

Szilard managed to shock fellow scientists, but few in the public at large paid attention to his notion until Kubrick’s movie; Smith, a professor at University College, London, believes that Szilard was the “real” Strangelove in this respect. And few gave credit to the possibility that this was more than just a cinematic device until Bruce Blair went public in 1993 with the assertion that the PERIMETR system was already operational. By that time we were all on that holiday from history and didn’t much want to look into it.

Smith never disclosed how Blair came to know about the real one built for the Soviets. So I went to see Blair myself.

I had become fascinated by him because he had a unique career arc that—like Ellsberg—allowed him to speak from inside and then outside the infrastructure of nuclear war. [154]But unlike Ellsberg, he had seen it from ground level, from below ground level. That trajectory had taken him from his post as underground missile crewman in charge of a wing of two hundred Minuteman missiles, to a Yale Ph.D. when he left the Air Force, to the Brookings Institution, to the job of congressional investigator specializing in command and control of nuclear weapons, to working with Russians on their own command and control system after the Cold War, to founder of his own nuclear arms control think tank—and ultimately to becoming the leader of the worldwide nuclear abolitionist Global Zero Initiative. I traveled to D.C. to talk to Blair at his office in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace building near DuPont Circle, where he heads up two think tanks, the Center for Defense Information and the World Security Institute.

What I knew about the Russians’ PERIMETR system at the time was what Blair had told Smith about it for his book. “It was designed to circumvent the possibility that a ‘decapitating’ surprise nuclear attack on Russia (something that was a persistent preoccupation of Soviet paranoia) would prevent the chain of command from ordering retaliation from the worldwide array of missiles, bombers and submarines equipped to strike back, but requiring [top-down] authorization to do so.” The way PERIMETR was designed to work, he explained, is that “In a real nuclear crisis, [in which the top has been decapitated or incapacitated from issuing retaliatory launch orders] communication rockets, launched automatically by radio command, would relay fire orders to nuclear combat missiles in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The doomsday machine provides for a massive salvo of these forces. Weapons commanders in the field may be completely bypassed. Even the mobile missiles on trucks could fire automatically, triggered by command from the communications rockets.” [155]

In other words, it was the Soviet version of the Letter of Last Resort, only it was a Machine of Last Resort—one that would make judgments about the reality of an attack without human input, one that would carry out orders even after the human order givers had been obliterated. When I met Blair, he confirmed the details of the PERIMETR system, and the fact that it was still in place and operational, although he qualified this assertion somewhat by saying there may be at least one human in the decision chain with the job of verifying whether the decapitation signal is real or a signals error.

One human link.

PERIMETR was the centerpiece of the Soviet, and now the Russian, command and control system. In his 1993 New York Times piece, Blair described one of PERIMETR’s command centers, in the heart of the Ural Mountains. “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.” [156]

A quartz nuclear war mountain! Something phantasmal about it, a satanic big rock candy mountain. A super-weapons Fortress of Solitude! But the quartz mountain melts in comparison with the PERIMETR dead hand system at Kosvinsky, in the heart of another mountain in the Urals.

“Kosvinsky,” Blair tells us, “is regarded by U.S. targeters 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 [i.e., PERIMETR], 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. Well, maybe not a world of difference—one or two human being’s worth of difference. The Soviet-built 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 turn peacenik. And the details of the device are still 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,” P. D. Smith writes. “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.”

Since the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have formally de-targeted each other, when PERIMETR is activated against whomever it is activated, Blair believes it will only take “a short burst of code” into its software to transmit launch orders to the warheads PERIMETR commands. (No one has ever disclosed any of the target menus in the Russian equivalent of our SIOP/OPLAN.)

There has been some confusion in the reporting about the PERIMETR system, particularly in its description as a “dead hand” doomsday machine, totally automated. In fact the system remains operational now, but it is not always in operation. It can be switched on or off during periods of crisis and retargeted according to the circumstances of the crisis. But even now, it is misleading to call it a dead hand system, if by dead hand the implication is that it can operate utterly automatically without that one living human link, that one living hand turning a key.

Blair is a soft-spoken sixtyish fellow who retains the military bearing of his Air Force career. He turns out to be one of the few people who know both the U.S. and the Russian nuclear command and control system intimately. He helped troubleshoot both, in fact. He too had once held the keys in his hands, the operational keys to a Minuteman missile launch, the keys to the kingdom. He had held the Russian keys as well, and it had changed his life.