The Soviets Made A Real Doomsday Device In The '80s
April 17, 2017 3:08 AM   Subscribe

 
Interesting article! It mostly left me wishing that episode 4 of Pretty Good, about Stanislav Petrov, would come back instead of being just sort of disappeared forever.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:49 AM on April 17, 2017 [4 favorites]


Not widely known is that there is no limit to the size of a thermonuclear bomb... if you don't care about getting one off the ground, it is possible to build devices with yields of giga-tons of TNT equivalent. These may exist, and may be part of this system.
posted by MikeWarot at 4:10 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


Stanislav Petrov is either history's greatest hero or history's greatest monster, depending on your opinion of human civilization.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:20 AM on April 17, 2017 [4 favorites]


See also: Tsar Bomba.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:34 AM on April 17, 2017


All seems fair: MAD in hardware.

Surely a massive launch by either the US or Russia guarantees all our deaths, what with fallout and nuclear winter and the utter fuckedness of the environment, no? All a dead-hand system does is

(a) make it quicker if nukes are deployed.
(b) deter the sort of tac-nuke action that the US is presently tilting toward.
posted by pompomtom at 5:02 AM on April 17, 2017


if you don't care about getting one off the ground, it is possible to build devices with yields of giga-tons of TNT equivalent. These may exist, and may be part of this system.

I wouldn't be the least surprised if at the height of the cold war the Germanies would be considered expendable by each side and nuked with such a device in case of an invasion.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:43 AM on April 17, 2017


I remember a few years back when "the Buzzer" radio signal, UVB-76, had some changes and dropped off the air briefly, there were a bunch of people freaking out because they thought it was related to Dead Hand which meant we were all about to die for some reason or another.

previously:1, 2, 3
posted by rmd1023 at 5:45 AM on April 17, 2017 [4 favorites]


It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
posted by Cookiebastard at 5:54 AM on April 17, 2017 [22 favorites]



Not widely known is that there is no limit to the size of a thermonuclear bomb... if you don't care about getting one off the ground, it is possible to build devices with yields of giga-tons of TNT equivalent. These may exist, and may be part of this system.


errr...evidence plz. The largest nuke ever detonated was Tzar Bomba, and that absolutely had an explosion of 57Mt. No-one has detonated anything bigger, and there are severe physical limits to how big a bang you can make before shockwave physics get in the way........
......not that this matters. 1Mt is plenty big and we have dozens to hundreds of 1+Mt warheads floating around.
posted by lalochezia at 5:57 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


and the geese could be dealt with using just conventional weaponry

Yeah but where's the fun in that.
posted by saladin at 6:26 AM on April 17, 2017 [2 favorites]


You can pretty much keep on boosting a nuke's yield as far as you want by adding more fission-fusion stages to the detonation, subject to such limitations due to shockwaves and things like weapon size. But if anyone's built anything larger than Tsar Bomba, they haven't tested it, and if you haven't tested a design then you better not rely on it, ya know, working and stuff.
posted by azpenguin at 6:29 AM on April 17, 2017


To be honest, I can't imagine that it takes more than a couple of very-well targeted nuclear devices to throw a country into chaos.
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:32 AM on April 17, 2017


Also, from Gizmodo: Reagan Thought This 1983 Nuclear Apocalypse Movie Validated His Nuclear Policy. That movie was The Day After, which understated the potential destruction possible.
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:34 AM on April 17, 2017 [2 favorites]



Zizz vud not be zo difficult, Mein Führer! Nuclear reactors could -- heh-- Mr. President. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Hennimals could be bred und slaughtered . . .
 
posted by Herodios at 6:39 AM on April 17, 2017 [8 favorites]


I can't imagine that it takes more than a couple of very-well targeted nuclear devices to throw a country into chaos.

William R. Forstchen's book One Second After did not need a whole lot of 'em for the 90% killoff.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:48 AM on April 17, 2017


and the geese could be dealt with using just conventional weaponry

Geese. Jesus Christ. With the squawking and the hissing, and mainly all the shitting. Goose shit everywhere until you can't even take a walk outside. God, I hate those things.

If I had a flock of geese incoming and a nuclear strike capability, I...I don't know man. It would be a tough decision.
posted by Naberius at 6:50 AM on April 17, 2017 [9 favorites]


I actually found this article reassuring. At some point in the mid-90s I read something about this system (or something darn similar), only the two things I recalled from the article was that both the US and Russia had such a system, and that it was triggered by seismic activity (with no other details included, or at least remembered by me).

As nuclear disarmament was going on and as we kept hearing about the inevitability of a meteor strike (on a long enough timeline), I would often wonder about these systems, if they were still intact, and what they'd do if a big enough rock hit the right land mass.….
posted by kimota at 6:53 AM on April 17, 2017


If you've ever had to deal with geese, you'd understand.
posted by adept256 at 7:08 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also, from Gizmodo: Reagan Thought This 1983 Nuclear Apocalypse Movie Validated His Nuclear Policy. That movie was The Day After, which understated the potential destruction possible.
posted by ZeusHumms


Generally, I've seen the exact opposite interpretation of Reagan and The Day After; that he was so shaken by the movie that he started moving confusedly towards the contradictory goals of reducing nuclear weapons and pushing SDI (weirdly, one of the places I read this was a book about the Perimeter system and other systems like it). Not saying Novak's wrong, but his take isn't universally agreed-upon.

My favorite bit of trivia about The Day After is that it was Nicholas Meyer's follow-up project as he was coming down from the high of directing The Wrath of Khan.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 7:11 AM on April 17, 2017 [8 favorites]


That's an excellent article; be sure to read all the way to the end, which is (IMO) the most interesting part.
posted by languagehat at 7:25 AM on April 17, 2017


Yeah, The Day After so shook up the conservative nuclear hawk establishment that they actually came up with an "answer" to it in the form of "Amerika" a 1987 miniseries about America suffering under Russian occupation. (think of a bleaker version of Red Dawn, with Kris Kristofferson.) The series was literally intended to counter the thinking of The Day After by showing why we must take such terrible nuclear risks.

and of course, like every other vision of America somehow being militarily overrun, and small towns in the midwest occupied by brutal foreign troops who stomp on our freedoms and take our stuff, its scenario for how this would come to pass makes no goddamn sense at all

and (more) of course, the irony is that now, with the Soviets long gone, its the conservatives who love Russia
posted by Naberius at 7:37 AM on April 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


If you've ever had to deal with geese, you'd understand.

International Law is what protects 'em. No one wants the local DNR or the Feds coming to adjust your attitude because of your use of projectile weapons. The geese know this and it emboldens them.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:45 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've gotten old enough now that I'm starting to see the short memories from one era to the next. I vividly remember being stressed as a kid about the potential for nuclear war. We watched The Day After as a family when it aired. There were bomb shelter signs all over the place - the school, library, police station, courthouse, on and on. However, they had stopped the duck-and-cover drills by then as everyone knew they were never going to save us.

We heard stories of the '50s from our parents, but we had no context for the nuclear tests described in some of the comment links. We just have no frame of reference for what it was like to live through the testing era, but we do have some information on its impact. It seems unthinkable to me that the US so casually engaged in the Castle Bravo tests, which resulted in mass scale sickness and death. It seems like in the following decades people started sobering up, bringing us forward from duck-and-cover to The Day After.

Now we sit often barely thinking about nuclear war. Gone are all the 80s movies with it as a central theme, from War Games to Spies Like Us. One of the many reasons that The Watchmen movie didn't click was that the central theme of every superhero act of heroism was laughably pointless in light of impending nuclear war is largely lost on modern audiences. Yet as we sit here, the bombs still exist in massive numbers and the number of nation states with capabilities has grown. We are perhaps closer now than we have been since the 1960s to someone using a nuclear bomb in war. We are unlikely to have a WWIII nuclear strike event between superpowers, more so than in the 1980s, I would think, but the potential is still there.

I find myself wishing the genre of Threads and the like would come back, and not as an action flick, but in the style of those original movies, showing what the average person's life would be like if they happen to survive a nuclear war. I think we need some sobering up again.
posted by Muddler at 7:47 AM on April 17, 2017 [12 favorites]


Yeah, now that I have, I'd advise yez to heed the Hat and RTFA. It's not long and there are pictures here and there, so it wasn't hard to bear.

The purpose of Dead Hand was via twisted logic to help the Soviets themselves avoid launching a retaliatory strike by mistake. Doing a little mental judo on themselves to maybe save the world.

It's nothing to do with Reagan Era nuclear fantasies, nor Strangelove really, other than to dramitize (sic) the gap (heh) between our common received understanding of 'Doomsday Machine' and this real one.

We apologise for our earlier errur.
posted by Herodios at 8:02 AM on April 17, 2017 [2 favorites]


A Colder War for another version of the dead hand.
posted by rough ashlar at 8:49 AM on April 17, 2017 [3 favorites]


"normal people talk"? Umm...you mean "English"? Jesus, is this a throwback to Sting wondering if the Russians love their children too?

It's not like the Russian-language version says anything other than what the literal translation says. What's the point of the othering?
posted by the sobsister at 9:38 AM on April 17, 2017 [4 favorites]


Doesn't anyone else think the whole Dead Hand setup seems... implausible? Given the constraints of the pre-AI technology we're talking about, and the sheer number of steps in the process, that it all seems very complicated and prone to malfunction. And then there's the actual *source* of the Dead Hand description....


Those criteria were described to Wired by Valery Yarynich, a former Soviet colonel, and other sources back in 2009:

>>>>>>... it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil.

It’s worth describing how Dead Hand would know if a weapon had hit Soviet soil. The system had a network of sensors to check for seismic disturbances consistent with a nuclear strike, it could check radiation levels, it monitored communications and communication intensity on military radio frequencies, and may have been able to determine if people were still alive in various command posts.

>>>>>>If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained.

posted by My Dad at 9:43 AM on April 17, 2017


Doesn't anyone else think the whole Dead Hand setup seems... implausible? Given the constraints of the pre-AI technology we're talking about, and the sheer number of steps in the process, that it all seems very complicated and prone to malfunction.

It was a Soviet system. Of course it's plausible.
 
posted by Herodios at 9:47 AM on April 17, 2017


Doesn't anyone else think the whole Dead Hand setup seems... implausible? Given the constraints of the pre-AI technology we're talking about, and the sheer number of steps in the process, that it all seems very complicated and prone to malfunction. And then there's the actual *source* of the Dead Hand description....

I'd rather have it pre than post AI. I mean, you start playing around with AI monitoring your doomsday machine and you end up with "HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."
posted by Hactar at 10:29 AM on April 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


Came for the Dr. Strangelove references. Was not disappointed.
posted by kjs3 at 10:29 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


In a crowd of people that watch Threads and When the Wind Blows for fun, am I really the only person that read "The Deadhand" by David E. Hoffman, which was the first book to cover this topic in depth, along with other fun topics like the Vector complex and the Able Archer scare? For Cold War nerds, I found this book more engaging than the more recently published "Command and Control".
posted by SeanOfTheHillPeople at 11:50 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


I find myself wishing the genre of Threads and the like would come back, and not as an action flick, but in the style of those original movies, showing what the average person's life would be like if they happen to survive a nuclear war. I think we need some sobering up again.

I dunno—as one of the generation that grew up with the sense that the end of the world was inevitable and looming, I can't say that it's all that great for kids to feel like nothing matters because doom is right around the corner at all times. We had all the fear and none of the ability to change anything. Didn't help us to be reminded, because what could we do?

Besides, pretty much all science fiction these days is postapocalyptic/dystopian, so the theme continues.
posted by sonascope at 11:54 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


The reason why I like Threads so much is because it could be a Ken Loach film or a really depressing Pulp song (Pulp are from Sheffield, btw). "kitchen sink realism" FTW.
posted by My Dad at 12:13 PM on April 17, 2017


The hidden computer is waiting for the incoming comm-link to tell it the general is still alive, so that it won't throw the switch that renders humans extinct--and, the clock is ticking. What could possibly go wrong?
posted by mule98J at 1:01 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


> It's not like the Russian-language version says anything other than what the literal translation says. What's the point of the othering?

Yeah, that really bothered me too. An unfortunate slip in an otherwise good piece.
posted by languagehat at 1:59 PM on April 17, 2017


I read that as othering military/government language, for calling the thing "System 'Perimeter'" which has the same official-code-name sound and silliness as YELLOW SUN or RIVET JOINT, but I know bupkis about Russian.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:23 PM on April 17, 2017


My favorite bit of trivia about The Day After is that it was Nicholas Meyer's follow-up project as he was coming down from the high of directing The Wrath of Khan.

My favorite bit of trivia about The Day After is that my cousin played the guy in the barbershop who tells John Lithgow that he doesn't think either side wants to be the first to use a nuclear device.
posted by The Tensor at 3:09 PM on April 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


There may be no theoretical limit on the size of a Hydrogen bomb, but the practical limit would be on the amount of Lithium Deuteride you could make and keep making as it degrades over time.
posted by Megafly at 4:12 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


Just saw Strangelove at the Paramount this past Friday. Its a bit unsettling how relevant that movie still is today.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 4:14 PM on April 17, 2017


Speaking of Russian nuclear doomsday weapons...
posted by mwhybark at 5:42 PM on April 17, 2017


"I dunno—as one of the generation that grew up with the sense that the end of the world was inevitable and looming, I can't say that it's all that great for kids to feel like nothing matters because doom is right around the corner at all times. We had all the fear and none of the ability to change anything. Didn't help us to be reminded, because what could we do?"

Yeah, there was a kind of low-level, omnipresent Sword of Damocles psychological gloom that we dealt with and I, for one, am glad to see it gone. What I feared was full strategic exchange between the USA and the USSR and although I disagree with the argument that this would "end most life on Earth", it certainly would mostly end human civilization and, especially, those of us in those two countries.

These days, I have a fear of a country like North Korea or Pakistan using a nuclear weapon, and it's no small fear. It's also less a fear than a sense that someone is going to use a nuke sooner or later. But while that will be bad -- and it will be bad -- it won't be the MAD of a US/USSR exchange. To me, the world seems much more safe than it was when I was young. I understand that this probably seems absurd to many younger folk, because, I suppose, the fact that we didn't have a MAD exchange means that people find it almost like a fictional conceit, not something realistic, and so in comparison the kinds of terrible things that are likely to happen now, including the consequences of global warming, will seem more severe. But I think this lacks an awareness of that sense of the constant awareness of almost limitless destruction many of us felt.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:17 PM on April 17, 2017


To me, the world seems much more safe than it was when I was young.

... seems.

"Our chief peril is that the poised nuclear doom, much of it hidden beneath the seas and in remote badlands, is too far out of the global public consciousness. Passivity shows broadly. Perhaps this is a matter of defeatism and its cohort, distraction. Perhaps for some it is largely a most primal human fear of facing the “unthinkable.” For others, it might be a welcoming of the illusion that there is or might be an acceptable missile defense against a nuclear attack. And for many it would seem to be the keeping of faith that nuclear deterrence will hold indefinitely—that leaders will always have accurate enough instantaneous knowledge, know the true context of events, and enjoy the good luck to avoid the most tragic of military miscalculations." (William Perry, "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink")

(also - Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?)
posted by Auden at 8:14 PM on April 17, 2017


SeanOfTheHillPeople I agree with your love of The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman. Most of it isn't about The Dead Hand system. Much more about chemical and bio weapons (that the Soviets manufactured in violation of treaties because they figured the US was violating them too.). And it won a Pulitzer, so it's got that going for it too.
posted by ensign_ricky at 8:53 AM on April 18, 2017


Came here to see how many people would comment on 'normal people talk'. Not enough, I'd say
posted by Hadrian at 8:54 AM on April 18, 2017


...faith that nuclear deterrence will hold indefinitely—that leaders will always have accurate enough instantaneous knowledge, know the true context of events, and enjoy the good luck to avoid the most tragic of military miscalculations."

Keeping one's eye on the topic of this thread (Dead Hand device), is dismal enough; keeping track of Cheeto Face Little Hands means keeping abreast of the advice given by the last person advising him before he, so to speak, kicks the football. Chaos, so sad.

I can take some solace in the notion that, since the exchange is not likely to be between the US and Russia, only a couple of countries will have their populations decimated by a nuclear strike. Sorry about that Seoul, Tokyo. We'll try to do better in the next elections.
posted by mule98J at 9:56 AM on April 19, 2017


IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."
posted by Hactar at 1:29 PM on April 17


No one caught this eponysterical?
posted by Chrysostom at 12:04 AM on May 14, 2017


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