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.'"

Comments

A more likely possibility

[elrous0]

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.

Forgot history?

[xzvf]

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.

Not A Doomsday Machine

[Geoffrey.landis]

It's a good article, but it's not a doomsday machine in the Kahn ("Dr. Strangelove") sense, a machine that destroys the world automatically in case of a nuclear attack. What it is is an system that allows retaliation after a nuclear first strike even if the high command is dead.

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.