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Soviets Built a Doomsday Machine; It's Still Alive
An anonymous reader points out a story in Wired introducing us to the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and that remains active to this day. It was called "Perimeter." The article explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, even though they never told the US about it. "[Reagan's] strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. ... A few months later, Reagan... announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. ... To Moscow it was the Death Star — and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. ... By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, [an informant] says, was 'to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.'"
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.
Nothing can go wrong!
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.
And nuclear weapons are sensible then?
Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war.
So the whole "Doomsday Machine" thing was an automated system based on ground sensors to launch the missiles in case US attacks.
I still wonder were alive in this world after all the shit humans have pulled off... Wonder whats next.
What's the point of building a Doomsday machine if you don't tell everyone about it?
Wasn't this the plot for a spiderman/captain America cross over or something?
The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?!"
First, where's the Dr Strangelove tag?
Second, (as Dr Strangelove pointed out) a doomsday machine only makes sense as a deterent if both sides know about it. Why wasn't the machine made public earlier when the Soviets thought that the US was about to launch an attack?
Third, no worries. A small, controlled population with a ratio of 1 male to 10 females properly sheltered will be able to keep society going. Naturally, the females will need to be chosen for their attractiveness and the males for the knowledge and skills they know (I'm thinking lots of engineers will be needed so sign me up).
Its construction might have had less to do with Reagan and more to do with the fact that a single moment of restraint two years earlier had stopped a nuclear war. This is exactly the sort of almost-disastrous incident that this system was designed to address.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8316692185126189734
the missiles sense you!
Some anti-Yankees (North Korea) could detonate a warhead to set off Perimeter, and wipe us off the map. Maximum return on investment.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
This thing only exists to keep the Russian military from firing off it's nukes. If they know the doomsday machine will take over if they can't, they have no reason to jump to a first strike conclusion.
The whole ND aspect of the cold war involved calculated appearances of insanity by both sides leaders. What "Perimiter" proves is that you can't expect the other side to fake crazy the same way you would fake crazy. This long after the fact, nobody in the US knows how President Reagan's moves were interpreted by the USSR nor how sincere they were in developing an automated response.
The cost of going down that path is incalcuable. Both sides spent themselves dry funding responses to every conceivable attack, and trying to detect which responses were fake insane and which might be real insane.
Who is John Cabal?
I wonder if the Israelis and Iranians have contemplated this possible chain of events?
Best Slashdot Co
From the article: "The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" cries Dr. Strangelove. "Why didn't you tell the world?"
I got news for you...while I will not go into any more detail than this, while I was in the Air Force I worked on a system for three years for the Strategic Air Command that would automatically launch all of our ICBMs if the chain of command was ever knocked out. As far as I know that system or its successor is still operational (I've been out of the military for 29 years). I am always amazed that the world has managed to avoid a nuclear war...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
...is the fact that it was designed by the Russians to stop them from making a pre-emptive strike. With an automatic retaliation system in place, Russia gets its revenge whether or not there are any survivors. There was no reason to announce its existence when its purpose is not to prevent your enemy from attacking you, but instead to prevent you from attacking your enemy.
Everything that ever is or was, was on Star Trek
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Corbomite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=413875
- Things are the way they are because they're coded that way -
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
It can still end like this...
I don't think there's a legal way to obtain the movie, so you know where to look for it... If you really think you want to. It's not something you can unsee.
read the article. It was to keep the soviets from launching a preemptive strike by reassuring the leadership that nothing could stop soviet revenge.
Indeed, Reagan's true achievement wasn't in intimidating the USSR militarily into despair. Rather, he managed to convince them that he thought Star Wars was a documentary. He then subsequently convinced them that we were building this fantastic laser-beam and ICBM-based international defense system that would annihilate them if they sneezed on us. Which cause the military hot-heads over there to spend far too much money on military defenses, while letting the rest of their empire rot.
Hence Reagan's irresponsible spending and gloating lead to even more irresponsible spending and gloating in the USSR - which became their undoing.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If ever there was a case of [citation needed], this is it. The story reads too much like one of those self-published research papers where the "professor" claims he's being plotted against by established academia - it's not the work of a wacko nut job, the research is being actively conspired against by people in power who want to keep it buried! The proof is in the same file as the data on the 200mpg carburetor!
Maybe no one knows about it because it doesn't actually exist... and no, some 85-year-old former Soviet officer "mysteriously" falling down some stairs isn't really proof.
#DeleteChrome
Why do we need a victory over Russia? They aren't even maintaining a replacement birth rate and have 1.4 billion hungry Chinese on their border. Why spend American blood and treasure when demographics will take care of the problem for us?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Thanks for your excellent parody of Dr. Strangelove.
Wired: News For Everybody-Where Nothing Matters.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
Kilgore T.
If one reads the article one soon discovers that it is misrepresenting itself. The Perimeter system is not an automatic response system - it transfers launch authority to an actual authorized person in a secure location who makes the launch decision. In no way is this an automatic "Doomsday Machine".
Is this a shocking revelation? Well, the U.S. has its own "pre-positioned national command authority" who does exactly the same thing! See Bruce Blair's book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
"But if you promise not to respond, I will order an absolute lockdown immediately."
Kinda reminds me of a little story
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The reason nobody talks about Perimeter is that it is largely the creation of Yarynich and Blair... A neat piece of semi fiction largely believable in the era immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, but increasingly irrelevant ever since. The rest of the world has moved on, but like the one trick ponies they are Yarynich and Blair keep flogging the same dead horse. (Well, most of the rest of the world has moved on - there's still a thriving industry in creative semi fiction about the Cold War.)
I first heard of this a few years after the cold war ended. Most of it was probably fictionalized but the way it was described is that three hardened telephone lines took widely separate routes from Moscow to a command bunker maybe a hundred miles away. These were severely hardened lines and for all three to go down at once could only mean that Moscow was nuked -- or some idiot tripped over a plug, you know how it is when you say something is fool-proof. Something else claimed at the time was that the Soviet method of controlling nukes was entirely automatic. The American system relies on computers sending launch codes via hardline or radio and human beings at the weapons personally deciphering and acknowledging the codes.
There could still be a hole in the system, say launch orders were improperly sent. I guess the pentagon thought erroneous orders could be directly countermanded. But there was a sense of comfort in having humans in the loop. By contrast, the soviet system was described as being completely automatic. I don't think that sounds completely right. I can understand maybe a missile silo being setup for automatic launch on order with the human crew just being caretakers but I don't see that working for a sub. The sub would have to get the order, the crew would have to bring the sub to launch depth, punching through the ice sheet if on polar patrol, and this is all assuming the Russians even had the ULF system the Americans did where subs at patrol depth could receive low-bandwidth radio signals -- because otherwise subs were incommunicado without coming to periscope depth and extending a radio mast.
The thing that still amazes me to this day was that the soviets could have a coup without nukes flying. I thought for sure a power struggle like that would end in a fireball.
The thing that scares me the most from the Cold War is we were raised to fear the specter of a Soviet attack but our own leaders were every bit as batshit crazy as they were accusing the Soviets of. Fucking Nixon and his brinksmanship, fucking LeMay and trying to start WWIII during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fucking Reagan as mentioned in TFA. Those fucking monsters did their level best to end modern civilization.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase.
polonium-210 milkshake anyone?
This system, if it's real, is a massive security flaw. Look at how it works. Normally, if you want to lock up nuclear weapons, you need to have the weapons dependent on secret codes, with one copy stored at the authority capable of authorizing a launch (a very limited list of people) and the other copy should be stored inside either a microcontroller inside the warhead itself or inside computers buried in an armored silo. Either way, it's very important to prevent physical access - that's why missile silos have elaborate security systems, and all of the information on how they work is kept a secret. Yes, security through obscurity DOES work as a strategy if your computer system is so obscure almost no ones knows about it. It doesn't work as a strategy if your "obscure" security method is contained in a win32 binary that is publicly distributed.
Anyways, for "perimeter" to work, once the system sends out an arming signal, the codes for launching the missiles has to be distributed over a much larger number of machines. Further, the absence of signals from a machine higher up arm the missiles - basically a negative rather than a positive safety interlock system. Very poor design.
Of course, I've read about a U.S. system where there is a UHF radio antenna on certain missile silos, and if communication is cut to that silo, the antenna becomes active. A RADIO FREQUENCY CODE can now arm the missiles. That's fcking stupid - what if the ancient computer that reads the codes has some kind of buffer overflow bug in it's 30 year old firmware?
While I'm no fan of nukes, your logic is seriously flawed: it assumes that the little, ongoing conflicts didn't exist before nukes made world wars obsolete. But of course they did.
There are hardly fewer of the small, regional wars going on now (and since WWII) than there were in the centuries and millennia before. That problem is as old as civilization, MAD certainly did not create it.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Would You Like To Play A Game?
Reply to That ||
Good thing China never figured out they could set off the doomsday machine with a strategic strike on the Soviet Union. Wait... I mean....
Ah but before you get too comfortable with your government assigned harem - and do you really want women whose "attractiveness" is determined by a committee? (oh wait this is Slashdot...)
But before you get started on repopulating the planet, you have to deal with the mine shaft gap.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
The answer to that is "plausible deniability" engineered biowarfare agents.(something is released on a target population and no one knows where it came from or if it is natural or not, and all the big players claim it ain't them did it) They proly already have bunches of them in blackops labs, both government *and* most likely private. I could easily see "private" efforts just for financial gain. Use your imagination there on how that might work, say something nasty, but isn't all that lethal, just close enough to warrant an expen$ive response..
If you mean "hard" tech, what we normally think of as weapons, that would be robotics combined with directed energy weapons, both directly offensive (lasers and whatever) and again, perhaps some plausible deniability directed energy weapons, like some sort of super HAARP weather control efforts that any state using them could just keep claiming were for "normal scientific research", etc., as in "we don't care what you think, that category 15 hurricane that hit your coast is just your bad luck, you don't have any proof, and you wear a tinfoil hat, etc"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the Article:
"Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike."
Now I'm NOT saying that a first strike doctrine in nuclear warfare is a viable war strategy but lets be serious here. I SERIOUSLY doubt the soviets could hide ANYTHING that could withstand a direct nuclear strike by anybody. Even NORAD could be reduced to vapor with a couple of very high yield or a barrage of ICBM nukes on the mountain.
So in the middle of the 80s, when things were pretty tense, it was clear the Soviet dictatorship was struggling and might do something a bit mad, and Reagan makes a gag on radio about declaring war on the Soviet Union? ("we start the bombing in five minutes"). He sure scared us Europeans. We're in the middle of a cold war and the USA has a semi-senile nutter who thinks winding up the nuclear armed totalitarian guys who are a couple of hundred miles away is a laugh?
If this is his idea of a joke, what's he really thinking? we all thought....
We got pretty scared then. I can believe the Soviet Union was equally nervous of this right wing hawk and decided to build some defence systems to avoid worst case scenarios.
Bow-ties are cool.
A more relevant question is whether M.A.D. works on religious zealots (or those pretending to be religious zealots.) Officially at least, the Soviets didn't believe in an after-life. But someone who does may be more likely to press the "Martyr Button".
Table-ized A.I.
A doomsday device that you never tell anyone about is insane. The ENTIRE point of such a device is deterrence. The article says that it was to keep "hotheads" from a first strike but that makes no sense. To keep it a secret from the US they would have to keep it a secret from most Soviets as well thus it can't serve the function of cooling hotheads.
And of course since the device is built by humans there is always the chance it will malfunction or function properly in a situation that was never planned.
So there are a metric buttload of missiles lying around all over The Former Soviet Union, just waiting for coded radio signals that will launch them.
Ah, yes - the good ol' metric buttload... It's worth noting that this is significantly larger than what Americans call the "Standard" buttload...
Bow-ties are cool.
Ah, so *you're* responsible for all the mutant ducks in my neighbourhood:
http://www.reallyfunnypictures.co.uk/animals/pic41.php
Before nuclear weapons the world fought numerous low level conflicts between spurts of global war. Now prior to the 19th century global war was difficult because people didn't go long distances, so lets start with the Napoleonic Wars. After they concluded in 1815 we had a number of small conflicts. Indian Wars in the US, Zulu and Boer wars, US Civil War, Franco-Prussian war, Italian Revolution, numerous conflicts in India, Crimirian War, Boxer rebellion, Russo-Japanese war, Spanish American War, US vs Mexico (Poncho Villa ), etc.... Then the Great War (WWI), after that we stopped fighting to get ready for WWII, whoops, no we didn't. Spanish Revolution, Japanese in China, Japanese border issues with the Russians, US all over South and Central America, Italians in Ethiopia, Europeans in Russia (their were West European and US troops all over Russia in the early 20's, Russo-Finish war. Now between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI, peace was maintained by overwhelming British Sea Power which kept any of those conflicts from going global. Between WWI and WWII the political will wasn't there to fight for a generation. After WWII if major conflict was avoided by nuclear weapons, which is likely, then good, but don't think that fighting limited wars started in 1945.
Its construction might have had less to do with Reagan and more to do with the fact that a single moment of restraint [by a soviet officer who got a bogus five-missile launch detection from a satellite during a crisis] two years earlier had stopped a nuclear war.
Same thing happened the other way, too.
The DEW line was turned on to operational status a few days before the announced date - in case the Soviets decided to stage a strike just before it was turned on. A few hours after that it began reporting waves of missile launches. (But it didn't predict the targets they would hit.) The general in charge decided that this might be bogus and held off pending reports of actual hits.
Turns out he was dead right. The big radars had seen the Moon rising - and misinterpreted the strong, long-delayed, echo as a bunch of echoes from later pulses (and thus a bunch of closer targets). And since the moon wasn't about to crash into the Earth the computers couldn't figure out where this cloud of phantom missiles were going to touch down.
The problem was fixed and the DEW Line went into service.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Because they aren't over their "great empire" and "the Third Rome" syndrome — and continue to challenge us at every opportunity, even if it means sacrificing their own welfare...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You'd discover that this is a very famous line from it:
Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
The whole movie is about the Soviets and a secret Doomsday device. The GP was quoting it because ti is both amusing and relevant.
Harold Coyle wrote a story "Dead Hand" back in 2002 using this device. I just started reading the book - pretty good - this weekend.
A decade after Reagan the USSR collapsed dramatically loosing the Cold War...
Well, then tell them to tighten it back up!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...It's called World Wide Web. It just takes a while to complete its mission.
Table-ized A.I.
Notice that none of that had anything to do with money. It was the relaxation of political control that led to the fall of the USSR, not an economic failure. The Soviets had demonstrated time and again that they cared nothing for the suffering of their people. They would happily murder them in the millions, let them starve, and imprison anyone who criticized the government. Moreover, they were still quite capable of competing with us militarily at the time.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work. Gorbachev recognized that, and decided to end the suffering of his people. Soviets were standing in bread lines long before Reagan. I know conservatives need to lay something at the feet of St. Reagan, but really y'all need to own up that the man was a complete joke that never accomplished anything but tricking Republicans into voting against their own self-interests.
Silo Lullabye.
Either that, or Tom Lehrer's We'll All Go Together When We Go.
Tweet, tweet.
It doesn't matter how many "doomsday" devices are built. James Bond will always get there before the counter reaches zero.
I think the Chinese are pursuing exactly this policy, except not just against Russia, but also against the USA.
They keep giving USA little pushes now and again and they also give the USA all the rope it needs to hang itself.
For evidence, you need look no further than that the yuan is pegged to the dollar.
From High School lectures on Nuclear Winter, our class was told that after the 27th nuclear detonation, anywhere on the planet, it wouldn't matter who won, or lost, for long, long, long time. Mainly because human civilization would be reduced to something slightly more advanced than Afghanistan.
So the whole "Doomsday Machine" thing was an automated system based on ground sensors to launch the missiles in case US attacks.
No.
If you actually read the article, it's a system that, in the event that it's turned on (and it's normally off) and senses a nuclear strike on Soviet territory, and the lines to Soviet command go dead, automatically gives launch authority of the Russian retaliation force to the humans that are lower down on the chain of command.
It's not "Wargames." It still requires humans to command a nuclear attack.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Because they aren't over their "great empire" and "the Third Rome" syndrome â" and continue to challenge us at every opportunity, even if it means sacrificing their own welfare...
The syndromes are there, but they don't matter. Russia simply doesn't have any real capability to restore the "great empire" - its economy is ruined, and so is manufacturing capability, and the present leaders are of a flock just as incompetent as the ones preceding them in Yeltsin's "democratic reforms" era. There's precious little new military tech being developed, and the one that is there isn't manufactured in any capacities able to change anything.
Human resources, as noted by GP, are also diminishing at an astounding rate - the population decreased by 500,000 every year (it fell briefly for 2007, but is back on track now), and that's not even accounting for shifting demographics where the entire society is aging - because people today have fewer children than a typical Soviet family would.
The above also has very direct consequences for Russian army, as it is mostly sustained by military conscription. So fewer young people means less soldiers. Furthermore, as fewer and fewer come every year - and as most try to dodge the draft - the military has to lower the health standards lower and lower just to fill the quota.
By the way, did you know that last year marked the first one when the majority of conscripts in Russian army were Muslims (because predominantly Muslim regions have better demographics and actually growing population, as well as better health and fewer draft dodgers)?
It is more logical to guess that the US did, in fact, know about it but kept that information secret to themselves, to not give away sources or any edge (perceived or real). Just like the UK didn't blab back to the Germans that Enigma was compromised. The Germans didn't know for sure it was, and the UK let them keep thinking that because that offered the strategic advantage. And even if it was "revenge", they still most likely thought that there would be survivors, and they needed that revenge strike to protect them in the future. A parent sacrificing themselves for a child type thing. *None* of the global war scenarios had every single human croaking. Someone was still going to win, even by just raw still living body count. Sort of a Rocky Balboa win was the worst case, 9/10ths beat to death, opponent loses because he got to 9.5/10ths.
Both sides in the cold war (and all throughout the leadup to ww2 and during the hot war really) had extensive spying efforts, electronic and human. They didn't rely on governmental official press releases to gather intel.
And to this day the US would probably claim no knowledge, as wherever (whomever) they got that knowledge from might still be alive and still needs protection both for him, and perhaps his handlers and the procedures used. I know if I was joe spy boss I wouldn't be giving that up. That's just the default, you give nuthin up if possible, ever, for any reason. You *gather* intel, you only *give away* bullshit, or partial bullshit.
As for the Russians, and opposed to the prevailing viewpoint here, I would say they had no advantage to leaking or deliberately transmitting the knowledge of the doomsday machine..because if you recall, all the nuke war scenarios involved multiple waves of attacks, from multiple sources.
Both sides *already had* an acknowledged and understood "doomsday response" in the form of sub launched missiles, and low altitude bombers. There was no possible way for either side to take out already flying bombers that were in the air 24/7, or really know where all the boomers were. maybe some good guesses, but.... And how about mobile based missiles? Or merchant marine armed Q ships? No way either side would have known exactly where they all were at any given time, so they would have been available for any of the response scenarios, first strike, retaliation, second strike, third...., in short, there already existed multiple doomsday machines, overlapping.
So, there was little to no advantage to the soviets to give it up that there was still yet *another* last ditch fixed based rocket weapon (at least fire control) system, and most to all the of reasons to just keep it quiet (of the nuke weapons, both sides also had extensive plans for bio warfare and chemical warfare, even if it meant "scorched earth", no one really wins, and also guerrilla fighting behind the lines that might have gone on for years and years, with hidden caches, etc)(Proly still some on US soil that are *really* well hid...).
Another possibility is that there ISN'T such a system but, now that things are heating up between the US and Russia, the Former Soviets would like us to THINK there is.
Things get really twisted when you're playing the superpower saber-rattling game.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What a strange thing it is to pursue total annihilation in the interest of world peace. Yet the horror of war is the greatest force for peace. Seeing as how the nuclear weapons haven't been used since the first time(s), I fail to see how they can CAUSE these small conflicts. I could see an argument that they facilitate lesser combat more readily because the conflicts CANNOT escalate, and therefore the larger military force with nuclear weapons is more disposed to attack conventionally, knowing it cannot be overcome conventionally. However, nuclear weapons also prevent the TYPE of warfare that they embody - TOTAL WAR. They stand as a warning against atrocity. We could conceivably use nukes as retaliation against biological, chemical, or similar attacks from lesser non-nuclear rogue states. No state would dare use WMD of any type in any capacity because of M.A.D. Of course, terrorists could be immune to M.A.D. They could also be used in the case of an all-out invasion or similar major theater warfare, for example if India invaded Pakistan. With such stakes, even the most hawkish generals are forced to reconcile their ambitions with the chance of worst case scenarios. The nuclear genie is out the bottle, perhaps, but I would argue that we resealed the bottle in horror after we realized the ramifications. The most dangerous nuclear weapons are the smallest ones. The less collateral damage, the more likely they'll be used. The newest low-yield nuclear bunker busters would open the door to 'conventionalized' nuclear weapons worldwide. Conventionalized nuclear war, now that is truly frightening. Thank god for the doomsday machine, it served its purpose, real or not.
You can't say civilization doesn't advance,
for in every war they kill you a new way. (Will Rogers)
I must have missed something. When was the first one discovered?
With an automatic retaliation system in place, Russia gets its revenge whether or not there are any survivors. There was no reason to announce its existence when its purpose is not to prevent your enemy from attacking you, but instead to prevent you from attacking your enemy.
This bit doesn't make sense to me. To keep it from being known to the US the Soviets would have had to keep it tightly under wraps from their own people as well. Perhaps it's possible but I see no sane way to reconcile the need for secrecy with the need to inform. A doomsday device no one knows about is insane.
Contrary to the teary memories of some, Russia has never been a great empire in any respectable sense — because that requires the population to have a respectable relative standard of living. Russia was never able to clear that requirement in recent memory — neither under the tzars, nor under the Communists. And they aren't moving in the right direction today either.
But they almost always managed to remain a threat to others, which is why Cato, had he been an American Senator today, would've insisted on destroying them...
You may be right about Russia's sorry demographics (Indeed, the next big war on Earth is most likely to be between China and Russia — over the lands of Siberia, which Russia holds, but can not populate.), but one needs not many soldiers to threaten the world with nuclear weapons — which are, mind you, the subject of TFA... And Russia's Muslim soldiers will have even fewer qualms about invading countries like Georgia, Armenia, Poland, Bolgaria, Moldova, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Lithuenia, Ukraine, et al, then the atheist or Christian folks...
I am not calling for an attack on Russia. I'm just stating, that the next round of confrontation is already on (despite the best efforts of the post Cold War American Presidents, including the current neophyte) and is likely to get worse again. We will be fighting Russia again — and when we win, I hope, we will not repeat the mistakes of the 1990ies...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The system isn't really a doomsday device, so much as it is a method to insure retaliation against a US first strike. While it would cause a huge mess if activated, it isn't devised to end the world any more than our military nuclear arsenal. Both are devised to hit specific remote targets with a fair degree of accuracy.
The real doomsday device that nobody has confessed to building would be a thermonuclear bomb that wasn't intended to be fired or launched at a foe, but simply dumped massive amounts of hydrogen into a multistage fusion reaction. You could quite easily build a thermonuclear weapon that had a yield so massive that it could crack the mantle of the earth and destroy all life on the planet. The technology has been available since the 60's, and it wouldn't be that hard to do, since you don't need to try to turn it into a deployable military weapon.
Any nuclear power capable of multistage devices is in theory capable of building such a device, so this isn't restricted just the US or Russia. You want a good argument for why the US should maintain an active nuclear weapon program? If/when a country like North Korea achieves this kind of technology, you want to turn the entire country into a crater as fast as possible with no warning, and 100% fatalities.
Just like Assault Rifles are normal guns everyone has painted extra-scary black, your "anthrax" powder is actually kool-aid - so I'm pretty much cool with you carrying it wherever you like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and when we win, I hope, we will not repeat the mistakes of the 1990ies...
The biggest mistake of 90s was to let free market extremists advise on the transition. It's that kind of approach that ruined Russian economy in early 90s, forever tarnishing the ideals of liberal democracy - that came alongside with the disastrous economic policies - in the minds of the people. It's truly surprising, how a benign word such as "democracy", which was very much favored and hope-inspiring in 1991 and 1993, became almost indecent by 1996, and downright insulting into 2000s (though the latter happened with some guidance from above).
The Soviet Union fell because communism doesn't work. Period
Not true. Communism as implemented doesn't work.
(Or do you really believe that communism is viable, and that the Soviet implimentation was flawed?)
There is no definite answer to the viability of communism. Communism has never been implemented as it was originally described by Marx. If you were to read the Communist Manifesto you would understand that, amongst other things, Marx never intended for it to be implemented in large countries. Karl Marx knew well enough to realize that large countries could not handle true communism.
It was the relaxation of political control that led to the fall of the USSR, not an economic failure
And why did they relinquish control of the other soviet states? Because they couldn't afford them. They needed to contract their sphere of influence in order to have any chance of maintaining their imploding economy.
Moreover, they were still quite capable of competing with us militarily at the time.
I don't know where you got that notion from. We have seen time and again how their military infrastructure was rapidly deteriorating throughout the 80s.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work
A stronger argument could be made that they failed due to lack of a meaningful plan. Their government-military-industrial-complex became top heavy with no direction. It was only a matter of time until their system ate itself from the inside out.
I know conservatives need to lay something at the feet of St. Reagan
I urge you to re-read my post if you took it to be an act of idolizing Reagan. You would do yourself well to consider reading some of my other posts as well, if you are for some reason accusing me of such an act.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
whoosh
Old news is Old!
I saw the article about the details of the Soviet Doomsday setup years back.. but great to have more detailed information.
Yea, it's scary, don't F with Russia
Old article.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09/soviet-doomsday/
I would imagine anyone sophisticated enough to make the weapon would also be good enough to come up with the cure or vaccine whatever before they released it. And that's just the obvious surface level.
And if it was just an economic weapon, designed to just make money or injure/cause economic losses, but not destroy the target group (or most of them), you wouldn't have to worry about it as much, because you would have wagamed the spread of it in advance anyway, into your own population or demographic, like sacrificing pawns for greater advantage..unless it was ethnic-specific, which is the most common of these sorts of "theoretical" weapons that have been talked about before.
Because you could sit back and just watch it unfold, come up with some "lock the borders down" response that you claim made you avoid much of the spread. Perhaps anyway. I don't flat out reject the notion that biowarfare agents could not or would not be used based on the "you'll infect yourself" counter argument, I've thought about this a lot before.
Here's another one why I have this view, suppose you or your group "didn't care at all" if you got infected, or if everyone got infected, maybe you WANTED that to be the case. A one way ride for *everyone*, let the FSM sort it out. Mad jihadis or even madder "the human species is the cause of all the world's troubles" folks could do it, an aggressive and faster form of the human voluntary extinction idea.
There are more. Just too many possible scenarios where some justification in the minds of the weapon's creators could occur for me to just dismiss the possibility of such weapons being developed or used, and given how much better and easier this tech is today compared to a few decades ago...feelin' lucky? I know I'd bet a year's pay that all these treaties "banning" bioweapons and so forth are a buncha paper, and the labs just got buried deeper.
And also. bioweapons are called in slang "the poor man's nuke".. for a variety of reasons.
This isn't really a doomsday machine, its just a automated mechanisim for retaliation after a US nuclear attack. Neither the US or Russia's military aersenal is designed to be a Doomsday device. They are designed to accurately hit remote targets. While wiping out all life on earth as a result of 10k+ nuclear devices being detonated, it is far from the goal.
The real doomsday device is far more terrifying than the system described. It is quite easy for a country that has multistage thermonuclear devices to build a single weapon that could produce a yeild that could crack the mantle of the earth and destroy all life on the planet (along with a good portion of the planet). A thermonuclear device can have its yield boosted by basically dumping more hydrogen into a multistage fusion reaction, and hydrogen isn't hard to come by. The US and Russia built increasingly massive devices in the 60's arms race, so the technology has been around for quite awhile. If anything it is simpler than weponizing a device for tactical use, since nothing needs to be micronized and it doesn't have size or weight restrictions for delivery. There are likely quite a few countries in the 'nuclear club' that could build such a device.
If you want a good argument for keeping our nuclear weapon program, consider what will happen if/when a rouge country like N. Korea achieves this technology. You will want the option turn the entire country in to a crater with 100% fatalities and zero warning if it comes to that to keep the entire world from being destroyed.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
M.A.D. is obsolete in the age of the evangelical suicide bomber.
Just imagine a group of 9/11 style 'dead enders' with a couple of box cutters and a few loose nukes. Ramp it up and shut down this whole Godless mess.
Or, maybe someone's wish for a simple eco-reboot.
Lots of dream scenarios for those who have no qualms about dying for the cause.
Wonder what Perimeter would have done if switched on back then. I heard that lots of people were watching the glow in the sky from the roof tops watching all the pretty lights. There was certainly a lot of radiation to trip the alarms, and lots of confused people. Most people didn't know what was going on until the story leaked out days later, after all the Governments children were carted off with respirators and other fancy gizmo's, and the International community was complaining about it. With Perimeter in charge they might have had just a few extra fireworks light off to make it all that more interesting.
but since when was Iran a dictatorship? I know they had a dodgy election recently, but so did the US in 2004, no one went round calling that a dictatorship did they?
There is no such thing as a "free market extremist", but that's beside the point. It may have been Russia's mistake to rush the reforms, but America's mistake was to not pursue the Communists (in particular — the KGB). Those people should've been treated like the defeated rulers of Germany and Japan 40 years earlier, with the high-placed ones all going before special courts, which would punish those found guilty of crimes against humanity. Or, at the very least, something like South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission should've been set up with the old regime's functionaries getting amnesty, but only in exchange for providing details and evidence of their misdeeds...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Perhaps we can just use the system from a Star Trek episode where we fight our wars using computer simulation. When a virtual job hits your city, you have to report to the death chamber. The war continues but society lives on!
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
A "+5, Interesting" like this is absolutely ridiculous. Evidently, neither you nor the moderators have bothered to read the article.
This system would not be the first to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. This would only launch, if those operating it could only conclude that a strike had hit so hard that there was no other authority remaining and that they thus couldn't establish contact with general staff within 15 minutes to an hour (dunno why the time is given so vaguely). So unless North Korea can hit the Russian military so hard that no other capability remains, this system won't do anything. And if North Korea could do that, why wouldn't they target the US straight away?
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.
Tablizer wrote: " It's hard to say what factors weigh in leaders' heads. We cannot rip out their neurons and study them in a lab[1], so we must use available clues to guess"
The Public Broadcasting System show "The American Experience" has a documentary about Ronald Reagan, entitled "Reagan" (released in 1998) that demonstrates the factors that weighed in the leader's heads to end the Cold War.
Tablizer wrote: "We should thank our lucky stars (or the Anthropic Principle) that we are still here......so far. The Cold War played with fire many times."
Actually, we should thank our lucky Star Wars.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, better known as "Star Wars") was a proposed missile defense shield that was championed by Reagan, and according to the documentary I mentioned above, it had a profound effect on the outcome of the Cold War, particularly because it was such a powerful negotiating point in 1986 at a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, between President Reagan and Gorbachev. In the transcript excerpt from the "Reagan" documentary below, Gorbachev says that the reason the Cold War ended was due to that meeting (I've highlighted the quotes in bold for easier locating). I've included a long excerpt to show how important a role SDI played.
I am Colossus. I was created by Doctor Forbin to keep you humans as my slaves.
HA HA HA...
I think that "yet" needs some more emphasis. The current situation appears stable, but just how robust is it? Robustness for MAD needs to extend permanently (at least, millenia). If you were to compare stability of MAD with operating systems, 60 years for MAD is the equivalent of 5 minutes for an operating system. 5 minutes without a crash for an OS won't adequately differentiate the stability of Windows ME from OpenBSD. It's not a sufficient test. Unfortunately, 60 years for MAD feels like a long time in human scale and humans are not optimized for dealing with long term catastrophic risks. Hence we get complacent, and when we get complacent we take stupid risks.
MAD has a series of inputs that will cause the apparently stable system to fail catastrophically. Neither side can be aware of all the inputs, or how the other side processes/perceives its set of inputs. This leads to unwarranted confidence, complacency, and skirting too close to the edge.
This would be an appropriate time to mention Hellman's risk analysis again. http://www.nuclearrisk.org/
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Giving us 10,000 years is very kind. To be honest I don't see us surviving the next 100 years. As you mentioned there are way too many crazies that are in the process of, or have nuclear weapons.
This is why we need to get off this rock asap. Yes, space is hostile, but it is about to get just as hostile here in a short amount of time.
We should put nukes in the hands of atheists, who have no sense of an afterlife. Having them in the hands of Christian fundamentalists (USA) or Muslim fundamentalists (Iran, Pakistan) is not a good idea.
An excellent article in the field of Omnicide Studies. The science of knowing about and preventing the use of any technology that is specifically designed to deliberatly eliminate human life from Earth.
This will probably grow in a University degree field in the next 100 years.
Omnicide must be acknowledged as being different from genocide and meglocide. The German holocast against the jews in the 1940s was genocide. The slaughter of millions in the insane Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was meglocide. Omnicide is "La Jetee", a sci-fi film from 1962, although that was accidental omnicide.
Omnicide is do by four ways: release of a toxin, release of a biological agent, invoking a total nuclear war, and triggering an geological or astro-physical event such as redirecting an asteroid to strike the Earth. The first three are generally available now and the fourth is most likely far in the future.
There is no such thing as a "free market extremist", but that's beside the point
Of course there is. In Russia's case it was a bunch of "advisors" from the likes of Lehman Bros that didn't see the need for an orderly transition, instead believing simply cutting-over to a free market based system would be sufficient to overcome the inertia of the previous system. Unintended consequences be damned.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And ppl thought I was crazy for working on bio and chemical weapons back then.
Amazing that there was something that was far far worse.
So, you're telling me libertarians don't exist.
What precisely gives the US the right to interfere with the internal machinations of another sovereign nation?
Contrary to popular US opinion, the US never defeated Soviet Russia. The Soviets were defeated by none other then Joseph Stalin who after WWII put the Russian economy on an inevitable decline by placing the vast majority of it's limited resources into increasing the size and power of its military. What parts of Eastern Russia the Nazi's didn't destroy the Russians destroyed to stop the Nazi's, Germany was in a better state then Russia by the end of the war. Most other European nations (even the US) put most of it's resources into rebuilding it's civilian infrastructure whilst the Russians did not, this meant that in 1960 the Russians had the largest and most powerful military on the planet but it was unsustainable as the military could not be supported by the still badly damaged civilian infrastructure. So in time the Russian economy collapsed under the weight of the military, it took decades and by the time the Soviet leaders realised what was wrong (1980-85) it was too late to do anything to fix it.
The US didn't destroy the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union was destroyed by the Soviet Union.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
one tiny little bug in the code/ wiring... and a huggggge worldwide firework
kabooom
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Earthquakes are often referred to have released the power of several nuclear bombs, as are super volcanoes. Is this system good enough to know the difference between that type of earth-shattering event and a nuclear attack?
Also, how does the system know who attacked them? Could Iran destroy America by dropping a nuclear weapon on Russia and letting Perimeter do the dirty work for them? If so, any country with a single atomic bomb could destroy the world by using Russia as their proxy.
Scary stuff.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I find this litte nugget of information more bizarre than the Perimeter system...
"Midway through the Cold War, American leaders began to worry that a rogue US officer might launch a small, unauthorized strike, prompting massive retaliation. So in 1962, Robert McNamara ordered every nuclear weapon locked with numerical codes. Irritated by the restriction, Strategic Air Command set all the codes to strings of zeros. The Defense Department didn't learn of the subterfuge until 1977."
no, wait a second, I really don't.
A network of independent, semi-automated devices, that would respond even if half of it were to be destroyed in a minute ? Arpanet was initially a secret military project... It just strikes me they were conceived roughly at the same time, and still look so similar. Of course, the main and huge difference is that secrecy wasn't kept on the Internet, it's certainly due to a completely different culture set in America, meaning that the Internet couldn't have been a deterrent to no western maverick general.
But still, this raises a few questions: Internet can certainly survive any obsolescence threats, but 'Perimeter' won't.
MUST.....Resist....Portal....reference
They certainly do, but there is nothing "extremist" about them — not in the usual negative meaning of the word. The free market is not unlike fresh sturgeon (to paraphrase a famous Russian writer), you see — there is only one level of freshness: the FIRST. It is also the last... Either you accept the free market or you don't — the "shades of grey" aren't really there.
Crimes against humanity are not shielded by notions of "sovereignty". If the West put its compassion aside and demanded, Communist thugs (some of them still active, others — collecting personal pensions occupying lavish Moscow apartments) be handed over for prosecution before any aid was delivered — the way it later pressured Serbia over Milosevic and his gang — the world in general and Russia in particular would've been a better place today.
And Joseph Stalin did so because he perceived NATO's and America's in particular threat to both USSR and the USSR's expansionist ambitions to be real. America was able to outspend the evil empire (which, as Kennedy quipped, tried to maintain 1st-world military on top of 3rd-world economy) and thus won the Cold War.
That's a meaningless statement — in every fight some of the blame for a loss lies with the loser himself. But the winner still gets the credit for the win. Not that any of this is on-topic, mind you...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nuclear arms are a complicated moral issue, but if anyone can get to the bottom of this, it's the internet!
Ah shit...!
Stupid.
"If the US detonated some new bomb that removed all human life within Russian borders, down to 500 miles underground, this system wouldn't be able to launch because the guy with his finger on the button would have been vaporized."
If that happened the Earth would be leaving orbit of the sun Sol for a voyage through the galaxy much like the moon did in Space 1999. Although on the other Dead Hand, one could imagine such a blast down to 500 miles underground might actually fracture the Earth into tiny itty bitty pieces in the resulting great big Kaboom! Either way it matters not who wins as we'll all freeze to death once the Earth leaves the Goldilocks Zone or get's smacked into bits.
In the former case those countries with successful Mine Shaft Gap programs might survive the journey through space! Think of all the adventures? Maybe the moon will even come with us or maybe it was above the former Soviet Union when the blast happened and it was obliterated by the resulting back wash of the jet of debris leaving Earth.
Either way... bring it on....!!! Oh, wait, no not supposed to say that... either way it's a good thing it's not happened. Dead Hand stop trying to salute the Führer. Ahem. Decorum restored. [:)]
Meanwhile, in ways both small and large, US behavior toward the Soviets took on a harsher edge. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin lost his reserved parking pass at the State Department.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
Isn't this what Al-Queda has done to the US?
Al Qaeda ran Lehman Brothers and AIG? :-)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I like your logic, but why stop there:
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.
Gandhi, Mahatma
But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you build such a thing?
<Ambassador de Sadesky: > There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
<President Merkin Muffley: > This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
<Ambassador de Sadesky: > Our source was the New York Times.
<Dr. Strangelove: > Based on the findings of the report, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious.
Nonsense. Utter, complete, absolute nonsense.
For goodness sake, the same banking families financed both sides of the cold war, were using the same debt strategies (or variations on the theme) to control both governments and populations on either side of the Iron Curtain. (Oooh, what a dramatic term! The curtain is IRON! Makes for great copy.)
--This means that the people in charge were not Russians and they were not Americans. It was somebody else at the top of the pyramid, and that person or group had no real interest in nuking everything in existence. Why? Because slaves can't clean your toilets if they have been reduced to ash.
However, controlling the slaves is another story altogether, thus we get the stupid drama which loud alpha males with salt & pepper hair sitting in their cigar-smelling easy-chairs barking endlessly with great authority about. . . Some of those strutting imbeciles are blathering away right now in this very forum. --Filled to the brim with important-sounding History Channel crappola. --All of it one giant, ridiculous, idiotic charade. You were never in any true danger of nuclear annihilation. No. You weren't.
And you can add the economic theorists to the idiot pile; those who argue over whether it was the Capitalists or the Communists who won or lost are just as deluded. When all the details are boiled down, this simple fact remains: All money in the East and West is borrowed from private banks, and all of it is borrowed at interest. The world is owned by the banks because it's impossible to pay back 10% on the principal when the principal is all there is.
Funny how they never mentioned any of that in school.
Now the question is this: Who controls the private banks? What do they fear? Who issues commands to them?
Whatever the answer to that is, one thing is certain: This Dead Hand nonsense is just a left-over piece of sensationalist crap designed to keep you in line. Same as the whole terrorist thing; a controlled bit of stage production using real, live idiots who really did think they were super-spies or Allah's children or whatever horseshit they're selling the testosterone junkie plebes these days. All crap. All controlled. All to make sure the vast majority of humans keep their heads down and their hands dirty and their mouths shut.
-FL
wow. go study poi sci then post back. This surface level understanding is why nerds need to stick to computer games where the rules are clearly defined
All the same, could somebody make sure this thing is turned off Dec 21 2012, just in case.
In true 1984 fashion for Iran they have a far away "enemy" in Israel which they can rant about to stir up feeling among the people despite there being little chance at actual military conflict. Nobody there or most of the Arab world cares about the Palestinians apart from as a symbol (or someone to sell crappy thirty year old rockets that never hit anything to, at a profit of course). The upcoming nukes are more likely to be used as a bargaining chip to stop intervention by the west if Iran does a bank robbery by military on Bahrain or a similar action. It's a bit of a race between when the upcoming generation takes control (should be a vast improvement but probably not democracy) and removes the extreme wackos from power and when there will be enough nuclear weapons for the Iranian leaders to show them off. Note that their President is really just there to keep the trains on time and has far less real power than the council of clerics - he made a lot of noise to try to get popular support and increase his power base but the recent "elections" have shown he's really just been chosen for the position by the mullahs.
On the other side the complete wackos Israel is sometimes infested with have the bizzare habit of bringing up the nukes every time someone in the US government makes noises about how the vast amounts of military aid should give the US a voice in Israeli conflicts. Hopefully those people who would happily give up all US aid and drop a nuke on Tehran before making a single concession to the US will be put in the prisons and mental hospitals they belong in. Until then there is no convincing Israel of anything and the best bet would be to remove the "made in USA" marks from all the ordinance that goes over there. On the grand scheme of things Israel's faults are minor for the region and there is some respect for the rule of law even if there is a wild west attitude of evicting the natives, sending them to a reservation and killing a few thousand of them to look strong every time there is an election. I have no idea what happened to the earlier generation that saw genocide and would not condone the loonies that want to carry it out on the Palestinians.
The thing that worries me most is that the final launch controls are still given regular upgrades. Lets hope they don't upgrade the OS to Windows Vista. God only knows what might happen.
Anybody else here think that this sounds a little like Dr Strangelove's plot?
Dr. Strangelove: Mein Führer! I can walk!
I want to debug this in Visual Basic 6.0 !!!
Please... just once!
+1 for mentioning the LHC
Devices used in the LHC need to be tracked after the LHC stops working
Ok this thing is creepy and could be in your next spy blockbuster, but isn't the assured retarliation the whole point behind nuclear submarines?
They are roaming the seas and nobody knows exactly where they are, and could certainly be triggered if some catastrophic event happened to the mother country. Certainly radio transmissions are less reliable in nature (interrupted transmission doesn't mean a severed wire) but some system could certainly be worked out. And anyway MAD is a lot more likelly to bring the world to its doom via paranoÃd reaction or plain human mistake than it is by technological failure.
I'll stick with the submarines.
The real problem is not "Dead Hand". Guys in the Kreml are totally nuts like their communists' "fathers" in soviet times. Remember, Mr. Putin is KGB officer. Mr. Medvedev is just "doll" in his hands. And Stalin in new Russia is rather hero and effective manager then torturer and Hitler's twin. They write such a crap about Stalin in the school history books. And Kremlins still believe that they can rule in whole 1/6 of world.
Remember Georgia occupation year ago? They already talking about the same scenario in Ukraine. Who is Russia best friend? Ugo Chavez and they just give him a bunch of weapons allmost for free.
I am Ukrainian and I know what I say. Russia is still dangerous and it is just smaller USSR. People kill people, not guns.
I wonder what this tells those that still fawn over Reagan and see him as a great president - as opposed to, say, a senile B-movie actor, who should have been in a care home.
Don't get me wrong, I don't "hate America" - but it does make me very angry, the way you guys again and again put unimaginable, destructive power in the hands of incompetent idiots who suffer from tunnel vision and are blinded by absurd ideology and/or religion. The fact that the world still stands, it would seem, is only due to the fact that leaders in other countries - USSR and China - have backed away from copying the American leaders' insane excesses.
I fear what the future will bring. In a hundred years, perhaps, we will have peace, but at what price? It will only take one idiot like Reagan or Bush in America and an Ahmadinejad or Kim Jon Il with nuclear weapons who is not going to back down and is willing to sacrifice everything. In a hundred years there will be peace, but will there be people?
Terrorism is the effect of our proxy wars, we all feel the effect of that in our daily lives now
This is total bullshit on several technical accounts.
First of all, the russians extensively used and still use hand-transmitted morse code with one-time pad crypto over shortwave and longwave radio links. There are people involved in the command-passing chain at every step. They don't even use the vault-lock like "permissive link" devices found in capitalist block nuclear weapons, because of the many people checking each other during the handling of nukes.
The "dead hand" system may give an automatic command to start nuclar launch, but to actually set the nukes in flight always depends on the decision made by the soldiers who literally hold those atomic warheads in their hands.
Another thing to consider is that fully, totally automatic event-chain from decision to launch is only possible with land-based, silo-encased, solid-fuelled missiles, even in theory. This is a very narrow slice of the russian atomic arsenal.
They traditionally use liquid-fuelled missiles for reliability reasons as well as historical familiarity with V2-derived liquid fuel technology. Liquid fuel requires topping up before launch, however, so there is necessarily a human in the loop before the gifts start flying. Solid fuelled russian ballistic missiles are mostly submarine-based, road-mobile or train-mouned units, where liquid fuelling would be impractical. Mobile launchers cannot be totally operated by automatons, for obvious reasons and therefore always enjoy local human-in-the-loop protection from Skynet running amok or whatever.
Human-in-the-loop is a potent security feature in the russian atomic arsenal. Unlike capitalists, Russian people have a congenial deep distrust of machines. They do not expect them to work properly in the first place and they do expect them to fail. They do not easily rely on machinery. If the automatic dead hand system would instruct a russian officer to launch a "doomsday" nuclear attack, he would start cursing to the goat-demon of cabbages and smack the terminal in the side to mend it.
It is higly doubtful if any russian officer would have ever launched nuclear weapons without having solid proof of motherland Russia being nuked by the evil imperialist. In 1983 a lower ranking officer of the soviet space corps indiviually cancelled an american missile attack radar warning occuring during his night-shift. It later turned out to be just computer malfunction and he had known it was junk, because nuclear war cannot suddenly start out of nowhere, without previous build-up of international tensions, that is well-proven in mathematical game theory.
Russians are afraid of nukes anyhow and they were never happy about their existence, although the unimaginable vast area of USSR gave a very good protection against being nuked. I mean where do you aim in the middle of a such piece of nowhere? Gorbachev was especially afraid of nukes.
USSR collapsed and now it is Russia with the same coco-roaches in head of it's leaders. Mr. Putin is KGB officer that hunted German dissidents. Do you really believe he changed his mind? Mr. Medvedev is just a doll in hands of Putins' gang. They say in modern school books that Stalin was a hero and effective manager. Do you know that? President Obama is very wrong believing that relations with Russia can be "reloaded".
Russia fights hard to deny Ukraine's and Georgia's right to became a part of NATO. They are still the same Russians, even if you can be so silly to trust "new" Russian politics. Americans now afraid of Usama and Iran, fighting with ghosts and forgetting that Russia is still the same.
The question then is how much damage can that martyr do? Most countries put a lot of effort into keeping nuclear weapons away from that sort of person. And those that don't, don't have many weapons to play with. Sure countries like the US might elect a religious nut who thinks it's his or her duty to end the world. But we haven't so far.
The economic model was fundamentally flawed. The Soviets never learned the lessons from Stalin's disastrous communist experiments
Your first statement is true only if you recognize that Stalinism as "the economic model" was an outright and total perversion of communism, with almost no real resemblance to communism as Karl Marx had first proposed in The Communist Manifesto.
The economic system was completely geared toward state interests (the definition of a planned economy)
The definition of a planned economy, perhaps. But the definition of a communist system, certainly not.
Calling the Soviet states communists is about as accurate as claiming that the United States runs solely on The Federalist Papers. Either argument falls apart in less than 5 minutes for anyone who has read either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Short Russian lesson: the Russian word pronounced "democratichnyj", has come to mean something cheap. A , for example, would describe a one bedroom flat without mod cons. It doesn't particularly mean poor quality, just what we in the west would probably refer to as "basic". It's not particularly derogatory in and of itself, but compared to how "favored and hope-inspiring [the word democracy was] in 1991 and 1993", it shows how Russians feel about the fall of the USSR. Many Russians DID have better lives before the split.
It would appear Slashdot doesn't like cyrillic. That ought to read "A democratichnyj kvartira, for example..."
So, you're telling me libertarians don't exist.
What makes you think every libertarian is a "free market extremist" (whatever the hell that means)?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
from Command and Conquer? Russia needs this "dead hand" technology in case the US launches chrono-troopers against key structures (like tiberium refineries) in Russia. Dead Hand exists to make sure the US only uses its weather control technology in defense.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The Ruskies have always been paranoid. What is so scary is that they have nuclear and biological weapons -- and they are paranoid. I doubt most American presidents and politicians have any idea how crazy they are. And a good shrink will do them no good: It's too late for them.
The suicide bomber was invented by the Tamil Tigers who are atheists.
Assuming a victory over Russia was even a possibility after 'nam and Iraq....
Someone warn President Carter!
wtf, this is not a doomsdaymachine! its more like the machine that tells other machines to do it. like skynet or more like WOPR! =)
Sorry, I meant "religious" *governments*, not rogue individuals.
Table-ized A.I.
Short Russian lesson: the Russian word pronounced "democratichnyj", has come to mean something cheap. A , for example, would describe a one bedroom flat without mod cons. It doesn't particularly mean poor quality, just what we in the west would probably refer to as "basic". It's not particularly derogatory in and of itself
"Democratic" isn't really derogatory, as you rightly point out, but "democrat" pretty much is - as in, "Yeltsin and his gang of democrats who ruined the country with their reforms!". "Liberal" is even worse in that regard (and is firmly associated with economic liberalism, not social, hence why).
Oh, and let's not forget about the common (and popular!) alterations - such as "dermocracy", literally meaning "shitocracy" in Russian.
If this Perimeter exists it can launch attack only if Command&Control structure is destroyed or isolated. No earthquake or rogue state can do it, even if the Kremlin evaporated - there are several reserve HQ around the country. Only deliberate decapitation strike can damage C&C enough to trigger automatic response. There is only one state capable of such strike for now.
The hotheads they were defending against wasn't the US. It was their own generals.
I know that but you missed part of my point. To keep it secret from the US they would have to keep it secret from many of their own leaders. I'm sure they trust their generals but trust isn't foolproof. If only a few people have launch authority and those people are taken out, the launch cannot occur. If you distribute launch authority or automate it but keep that a secret, it INCREASES the risk of disaster. A secret disincentive is no disincentive at all.
How do you make sure you don't press the button first for fear that you're under attack when in fact it's nothing of the sort? Well, one way would be to devise a system so that MAD was still possible even if they were all dead.
What we are talking about is a sort of dead man's switch. Used in the context of a bomb it is a fail-deadly instead of a fail-safe system. In essence this system scarily similar to what a suicide bomber might use. The Soviets were scared but I didn't think they were suicidal.
A system like this is designed to go off no matter what so you can make a credible argument that it reduces the incentive not to launch first. If you think you are going to die anyway and you know you will likely kill your "enemy" you have less incentive not to launch first.
I'm willing to be convinced but I've studied a fair bit of game theory. I just haven't seen an argument I buy that this system somehow would reduce the incentive to launch first.
Could it be that it was just a rumor started to make the U.S. think there was such a system in place. I remember hearing for years about such a system that was based on a disguised cargo ship that was essentially a giant bomb. It was supposedly equipped with sensors that would detect an attack on the Soviet Union, with the objective being polluting the earth with so much radioactive fallout that a world wide nuclear winter would ensue, ensuring that the Soviet's enemies would die no matter where the bomb was detonated. This story has been around for a long time.
So, you're telling me libertarians don't exist.
What makes you think every libertarian is a "free market extremist" (whatever the hell that means)?
Probably the same thing that makes many slashdotters think that every Christian is automatically an anti-science, young earth creationist. Extremist of any given group tend to be the loudest and most easily identified by outsiders, even if their beliefs significantly deviate from the larger group they claim to be part of.
I would also say a "free market extremist" would be someone who takes it on faith that an unregulated market-based solution is always the best in every possible situation. I know that this doesn't describe every or even most self-avowed libertarians, but it's a fair description of at least a few I've seen on slashdot and elsewhere on the Internet.
Extremists never classify themselves as extremists.
This is what make it extreme. The shades of grey are there, you simply do not wish them to be.
Sorry but like the first part of your post the rest is bunk. Please learn some history. You wanted to try the soviet leadership in order to extend the US's penis size, not to attain any meaningful goals. Crimes against humanity or war crimes are not punishable by the US, you are not judge, jury and executioner. They are judged by the international community and you never would have been able to convince level headed nations that the alleged acts of previous soviet leaders required the punishment of current soviet leaders. Unlike Milosevic there was no clear indication of guilt, no planned genocide or forced migrations. Besides this, the perpetrators were long since dead. International law does not recognise the "sins of the father".
Further more, if the US had of asserted control over the Russian people it would have been even worse, what you still fail to grasp after Vietnam or Iraq is that some people just do not want you to control their lives. The Russian people are highly nationalistic (even more then USian's) and would never have accepted a proxy US leadership. Instead of poverty and crime, you'd have civil war and another dictator in place by the end of it. Basically it would be 1917 all over again.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Fair questions.
Blind faith. Libertarians have absolute faith that the free market will fix everything. Much in the same way an Islamic or Christian extremist believes that word of God is the absolute truth. This is based entirely on a belief which ignores evidence to the contrary and often involves attacking it's detractors.
Now not everyone who appreciates the free market has absolute faith in it, whilst mostly a good thing(TM) it has it's limitations and serious drawbacks if not properly monitored. If the free market worked in the way libertarians believe it did Microsoft would not exist as a monopoly, it is only after MS became an abusive monopoly that it started having restrictions placed on it.
I suppose if you wanted me to define a "free market extremist" in less specific terms I would say that a free market extremist is one who is vehemently or irrationally opposed to any economic concept that does not fit perfectly into the free market philosophy E.G. regulation and will ignore any evidence to the contrary of their beliefs.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I thought grunge was the biggest mistake of the 1990s
No; libertarians think the government shouldn't be responsible for fixing everything.
While the article heavily focuses on Reagan and the SDI, the connection (particularly to SDI) simply doesn't seem plausible to me. If the US can shoot down your missiles, what difference does it make if you can fire them after a decapitation strike? Further, nuclear missiles and traditional bombers give you plenty of warning, and time to do your part to end life on this Earth.
However, if the US can send a nuclear-armed stealth aircraft into your country (as it was operationally capable of since at least 1983) and obliterate your entire chain of command without anyone knowing about it until they were shadows on a wall, *that* is something to worry about, and a reason to build such a monstrosity as a counter-measure.
It also lends some justification to the paranoia about a desire to strike first: the F-117 is a weapon that would allow Reagan do it, and think he could get away with it.
You are attempting to imply, that I myself is an extremist and therefor fail to recognize fellow extremists (who rushed Russia's reforms). First of all such soundbites don't prove anything, but only obscure the discussion. It would've been a lot easier, if you were honestly stating your accusation...
Back to the point, free market is the best — and must be an ultimate goal of every society. It is not any more a matter of faith, than the "belief" in personal liberty — because the liberty is what makes free market the only possible way for an economy — the market's participants are simply the people pursuing happiness.
This is a moot point, because Russia never got a free market — the mistakes of their administration of the 1990ies (and its foreign advisers, if any) was not in the goal, but in the means of getting there...
This statement is so easy to turn 180 degrees — while keeping its accusatory arrogance intact — that I leave it as a reader's exercise...
As to your disapproval of "extremes", allow me to rephrase some other "extremists" to demonstrate my point:
There is more, where these came from and all of them mock the notion, that extremism is automatically bad...
False. I want to a) extract vengeance; b) provide historical disincentive for the future generations of assholes; c) get the corrupt criminals off the backs of the Russians, so they can rebuild their country. I don't know, why you had to bring "penis" into a discussion...
In Nuremberg they were... In Japan they were... Both Germany and Japan became prosperous free countries within 20-30 years afterward. Russia is not even close — maybe, purging the higher crust of a rotten criminal regime was needed?..
And you are not the defense counsel, what's your point?
First, monsters like Lazar Kaganovich demonstrated amazing longevity... Second, there were plenty of crimes (against humanity) committed after Stalin's passing — by people not only alive, but not even retired in the 1990ies.
More importantly, the Communist Party itself should've been disbanded, its assets confiscated, its ideology banned — like the National Socialists of Germany and the Baath of Iraq (all three had very small differences in goals and tactics, BTW). Instead, they are the second-largest party in today's Russian Duma...
And Germans and Japanese did?..
Your dire scenario
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I first heard of this a few years after the cold war ended. Most of it was probably fictionalized but the way it was described is that three hardened telephone lines took widely separate routes from Moscow to a command bunker maybe a hundred miles away. These were severely hardened lines and for all three to go down at once could only mean that Moscow was nuked -- or some idiot tripped over a plug, you know how it is when you say something is fool-proof. Something else claimed at the time was that the Soviet method of controlling nukes was entirely automatic.
Lida The American system relies on computers sending launch codes via hardline or radio and human beings at the weapons personally deciphering and acknowledging the codes.