Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
And nuclear weapons are sensible then?
Say what you will about nuclear weapons but they are probably the only reason that humanity hasn't fought World War III yet.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You're right, nuclear weapons have kept us from getting involved in another massive global shooting war. On the other hand, they've allowed us to settle into a basically constant series of low-level conflicts across the globe. So, instead of having one giant conflict that lasts for a few years, we have a never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts that go on forever. Nuclear weapons haven't curbed our innate desire to destroy ourselves, they've just made it more of a long-term commitment to do so.
Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
So technically if someone wanted to deal a massively destructive blow to the US they could just locate one of these "ground-based sensors" inside Russia and create some sort of "devastating blow" to set the entire system off. I guess one should be relieved that certain anti-american groups haven't done so yet.
The Long Now Foundation
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?
But we weren't having just *one* giant conflict that lasts a few years. We were having a *series* of them. So we replaced a never-ending series of giant conflicts with a never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts. It's not perfect, but it's progress.
...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.
are you really comparing afganistan and iraq and eery other way we fought in the last 20 years to WWII / I ?
Despite the media hype, actually look at the number of lives lot / property destroyed. Sorry, not even close.
I believe he's trying to say that our current system of having a basically never-ending series of localized conflicts is preferred over our old system of having a major earth-shattering conflict every 25 years or so. The point is a good one, I think, especially if you believe we likely would have gotten involved in WWIII sooner rather than later between the Soviets and Americans without the threat of mutually assured destruction. Given the hostilities between the two powers, it's at least a strong possibility that we would have.
So, his argument that we're better off now is perfectly valid, although I'm sure the people living in the various conflict zones would disagree. Of course, figuring out how to live together without killing each other would be better still, but humans have been around for a long time and have yet to do that, so I guess we take what we can get.
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.
At the risk of stating the bleedingly obvious, since you're claiming to have been in the military, and you are stating something obviously directly related to national security... I can't imagine this would be unclassified at its inception and remain so. Therefore, for you to tell us this, it would have had to be declassified at some point, and you would have received a communication to this effect.
Please provide a citation with either the name of the authority who notified you of the new classification status, or whatever relevant information is required to get an authenticated document confirming this statement. Otherwise, you're seriously lacking in credibility and/or taking an enormous risk posting this publicly. Or you're just plain nuts.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So, instead of having one giant conflict that lasts for a few years, we have a never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts that go on forever.
WW2 killed over 70 million people in 7 years, on all sides. I've yet to see any small-scale conflict with similar sustained casualty rates. There are occasional spikes, like Rwanda genocide, but those don't really fall into Cold War proxy wars.
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
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.
"So we replaced a never-ending series of giant conflicts with a never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts."
I disagree. There would be exactly one giant conflict. There wouldn't be much of humanity left after that.
--fatboy
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, the grandparent poster is not a person at all. It is a computer programmed to alert the Soviets about our own Doomsday Device by posting about it on Slashdot, activated as soon as it detected information about the Soviet device.
Terrifically cunning plan, eh?
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;
Presumably it would take more than one to trigger a counterstrike. It would probably require several, plus loss of connection to multiple communications facilities. The Soviets may have been paranoid, but they generally weren't stupid. A fault along those lines could trigger an initial strike, guaranteeing an American counterstrike.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
Dont worry I honestly believe that the moment that we discover another intelligent species we will have instant world peace. On our world at least... We will simply have the first worlds war. But thankfully we will have generations of experience at war. We will teach them peace loving aliens a lesson or two about technology.
But we weren't having just *one* giant conflict that lasts a few years. We were having a *series* of them. So we replaced a never-ending series of giant conflicts with a never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts. It's not perfect, but it's progress.
When elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers. The grass in; Afganistan, Viet Nam, Korea, Iraq, the Balkans. We, here in America, don't really feel the effects of our proxy wars. I'm not sure what's happening is progress.
Best regards.
Hate to break it to you but we have had "never-ending series of small but locally devastating conflicts" pretty much for as long as humans have been around.
I think the design of the device fits in quite logically with human thinking, but so does Mutually Assured Destruction.
Remember (apologies for the history lesson), the deterrent factor that has probably prevented at least one, and possibly two or three additional World Wars by now was the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). "You don't dare fire missiles at me because you know I'll fire everything I've got at you, and the planet's pretty much done for." "Game over, man! Game over!" On the surface, it seems illogical, but it's actually EXTREMELY logical. MAD ties our survival inexorably with that of our enemies. A war, once started, is assured to be death for both sides with almost no exception. It sets the price barrier far beyond what any sane country would be willing to pay from the get-go. No one wants to start a war with that much of an assured outcome. "A strange game - the only way to win is not to play."
Traditional shooting wars, on the other hand, can start small and slowly grow, turning rapidly into self-justifications like "we can't pull out now or the hundreds of our people who have died so far will have died meaningless lives! Honor their sacrifice! Fight on!" That logic, which is very typical during a shooting war, leads to the loss of thousands, then the same argument allows escalation to the loss of tens of thousands, and so on until you are counting in the millions. Surrender becomes impossible except under the threat of an obviously overwhelming loss, and maybe not even then. Surrender or compromise is seen as invalidating the sacrifice of the people who died during the fighting. It's not right, but it's human.
MAD pretty much eliminates that. If any country has MAD capability, then we won't attack them. So the nuclear-holders of the world cannot attack each other directly, but of course they can involve other countries indirectly. The best MAD scenario would logically be for everyone to have MAD capability, but those that already have it would be deeply loath to let any of the countries they've been beating up on into the game. Anyway..
Back to "Perimeter":
Given the rules/logic behind MAD, the real risk is not that a decisionmaker would want to destroy the enemy at the cost of his own country - there are enough decisionmakers to pretty much (but not completely, of course) ensure that actual MAD would never be knowingly implemented. The real risk is that he might think the enemy has already committed to destroying him, and that he has nothing to lose and must implement his destructive capabilities before the enemy destroys his capability to retaliate.
The only thing worse than a false negative (you die but don't manage to kill your enemy) in MAD is a false positive (you end up attacking your enemy by mistake, and you both die). The possibility of false negatives is proportional to the chances of a false positive (the more you feel you need to act preemptively, the more likely it is that someone will). "Perimeter" reduced the possibility of a false negative by assuring generals that they could wait and make DAMNED SURE it was an attack before retaliating. Therefore, it significantly reduced the possibility of a false positive (preemptive strike when the side that launched first thought it was retaliating).
"Perimeter" is arguably one of the most logical things Mankind has ever built. It was a well-designed solution that significantly mitigated the problem.
Logic != Morality or Correctness.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
What makes anyone believe that such "never ending local conflicts" weren't common before the world wars?
During the world wars, entire nations were flattened. Civilians were slaughtered by the millions and collateral damage occured by the 100s of thousands. 100 thousand soldiers would die in one battle.
Conflating the occasional bush war with this is the sort of historical illiteracy that has gotten airplay on CNN lately.
The term "balkanize" exists for a reason as does the observation that every great power must impale themselves upon Russia, Afganistan or both.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I think you give nukes too much credit here. I agree with the concept of MAD. It did "work". Though "work" kind of assumes that one side was actually planning to take the other out. Frankly, I think the USSR had enough of its own problems internally, and was never an actual threat on the scale that it was made out to be. I kind of put the whole USSR threat on par with claiming monster trucks are some new army that we need to watch out for based on watching one of their shows.
In fact, I have heard that some analysts put the effectiveness of the Reagan strategy as having hastened the fall of the USSR by all of about 2 weeks or so (which is just to say, it looked like it wasn't going to last no matter what "we" did)
The new "small conflicts" paradigm, I think, comes from a couple of things.
1. Major nations are ALL at the point where major conflict between each other is (and has been for many years) way too costly of a proposition.
2. Major nations are ALL trade partners with one or more other major nations and thus have extra incentive to prevent major wars (either involving themselves or their trading partners)
3. Everyone else realized that they can not possibly hope to fight a major nation in a traditional battle, so strategies have evolved to focus mainly on asymmetrical warfare (terrorism, ambushes, traps, general hit and run tactics, infiltration etc)
Its one thing to call terrorists cowards but, it misses the point.... any other form of warfare would be absolute suicide. You may as well wonder why they don't all stand in wide lines, several deep, and fire muskets.
War has evolved. Little had to do with nuclear weapons, they are just sort of the biggest and the baddest reason why conventional warfare was subject to deselection.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Post-hoc fallacy. All of the current in the world conflicts involve third-world shitholes with corrupt officials and are coincidental to the rather benign posturing of the major powers against each other. Third-world shitholes are volatile from start to finish.
The primary reason there hasn't been a WWIII is global trade. You don't need to invade the other guy's turf to get his resources if he will dig it out, put it on a ship, and send it to you for a reasonable fee. "When goods cannot cross borders, armies will." — Frédéric Bastiat
This doesn't work for religious-based or other similar scenarios where the total destruction of earth is believed to bring about a desired spiritual event. If someone wants to destroy the planet, there is no deterrent.
Both Iran and Syria want nukes because we in the west turned a blind eye to Israel developing them.
I dont read
Exactly. The first (and for a while, second) world outsourced its violence, suffering and oppression to the third world. We let Baghdad be carpet bombed instead of Coventry. Union leaders get murdered in Bogota instead of Detroit. We haven't reduced the shittiness humans do to each other, we have simply shifted the majority of it only people that the general population, at a subconcious level at least, do not consider fully human.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
What makes you think that the current fragmented conflicts are less deadly than a world war? Let me tell you; its because neither you nor anybody you care about are affected. Let me give you an example; between 1998 and 2004 about 4 million were killed in the second congo war; and that was a fairly localised conflict. Add that to the casualties form the other wars in that period and you like get a figure not far off a world war.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Everyone wants to see the final transformation of man in their lifetime - the *evolutionary* shift of humans to global peace. Change is *slow* and, like chemical reactions, complete on their own ... which leads to another fallacy ... if we endure, there is not end - no end goal - it just keeps on going.
We (as humans) are not yet above war - it is still in our nature. Rather than focus on the effects of war, we should focus on the many root causes. It's still about the haves and have-nots.
The nature of war is changing too ... In the past, I would have to cross your waters, and rape/pillage everything between where I landed and your castle/village/condo/etc. Now, we can send a laser guided missile straight into your favorite summer home bathroom window! We just spared the air! (By not burning all the crops).
Either way, emergence theory and patterns in nature predict cyclical behavior in all systems. Our time is coming. Quit your crying. Smell the roses, call your mom, kiss your wife, hug your kids, pet your dog ... and stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye baby cuz we're all going out with a BANG!
"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" .... I think I just felt karma points slipping away ...
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
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.
All of the current in the world conflicts involve third-world shitholes with corrupt officials and are coincidental to the rather benign posturing of the major powers against each other. Third-world shitholes are volatile from start to finish.
Um, yeah ... except for the wars the major powers are fighting in third-world shitholes.
The primary reason there hasn't been a WWIII is global trade. You don't need to invade the other guy's turf to get his resources if he will dig it out, put it on a ship, and send it to you for a reasonable fee. "When goods cannot cross borders, armies will." -- Frédéric Bastiat
Sentiments like that were very common in the 19th and early 20th centuries; Bastiat came of age in France in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and it may have seemed like a natural conclusion to him. Many Europeans kept believing it all the way up to 1914.
And then, well, 1914 happened. Anyone who, after that year, seriously believes that trade stops wars is hopelessly naive.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You say that like it's a bad thing... (sadly only half joking)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
Well, the same NPT stipulates that the existing nuclear powers are to strive towards total nuclear dearmament. That hasn't happened, so it's really hard to see much more validity in that treaty anymore than the right of the strongest to bully the weakest to compliance.
"The planet could easily survive removal of all human life within the borders of Russia down to 500 feet below ground."
It migth come as a surprise to you but the planet could easily survice removal of all human life within USSR *and* USA too, so that means that the USSR device isn't a doomsday device either, doesn't it?
You seem to be leaving out that the European Union grew out of the European Economic Community.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
If you don't see how intelligence increases your chances for survival -- for an individual, a tribe, a society, or a species -- then you've just proven you don't have much intelligence of your own.
It's also interesting how you can claim to be a feminist, yet make statements like this:
if you've only got 1 man per 10 women, any group with 10 men and 1 woman's going to kill that man.
And why is it that women automatically can't defend themselves?
Plus, you're assuming that such a group exists, has survived the fallout, and that intelligence isn't a factor -- any group with 10 men and 1 woman's going to have a hard time against 1 man, 10 women, and 11 guns.
A lot of people here don't get it because they've been brainwashed by the US/western media to thinking that the USSR was 100% evil.
Certainly the USSR were evil in many ways. But a lot of their arms build up was in reaction to the USA.
If you look at things from a non-US perspective, it's often not that clear that the USA are the good guys and the USSR automatically the bad guys. Put yourself in the shoes of a USSR leader, would you be 100% sure that the USA will not attack your country? Just look at the USA's track record of intervention and regime change (yes I know the USSR weren't clean either - but see it from their side).
Much Soviet military tech made more sense from a DEFENSE perspective, even if not as good as comparable USA tech for "projecting force". Especially "projecting force" to the other side of the world - which I consider a more offensive capability than defensive. Many people said the early shkval torpedoes were useless because of their short range. No they were still OK for defense. Or the USSR nuclear missiles weren't as good at taking out hardened missile silos (which is only a useful feature for offense).
The "doomsday machine" helped the Soviet leaders save face and satisfy themselves that if the Evil USA nuked their homeland, the capitalist pigs will also be nuked to bits too. It is useless from an offense/"attack the USA" perspective, but it is by no means insane.
However perhaps it would have made more defensive sense to vaguely hint to the USA that they had the ability to do that (but I'm sure there's a lot the NSA know that they aren't telling).
Er what? Europe was split into two roughly equally powerful alliances before World War One. Hence the Blackadder quote
Blackadder: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent a war in Europe, two super blocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side; and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast, opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war.
Baldrick: Except, well, this is sort of a war, isn't it?
Blackadder: That's right. There was one tiny flaw in the plan.
George: Oh, what was that?
Blackadder: It was bollocks.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
WW2 was won by poor long suffering soldiers, sailors and airmen - just like all wars. And the folks who suffered most and fought the hardest in WW2 were the Soviets - we not have liked their system of government but what the Soviet people went through in WW2 should never be forgotten.
You mean the war of Southern Asshattery, Johnny Reb. It was your boys who fired first.