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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?
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.
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)
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?
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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 -
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.
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.
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
Here's a more relevant quote from TFA:
So it sounds like the purpose of the devices was more to deter a Soviet first strike, rather than a US first strike.
I don't care why you're posting AC
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?
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
I must have missed something. When was the first one discovered?
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).
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.
Only those approved by the Iranian government as sufficiently Islamic can run for any office. Media outlets deemed too liberal are routinely shut down in the lead-up to the elections.
The president of Iran answers to the Supreme Leader of Iran, currently Ayatollah Khamenei. The Supreme Leader's word is final in almost all matters, though he technically is subject to the approval of the Assembly of Experts. But since the Assembly of Experts is elected from candidates approved by the government -- and the Supreme Leader -- the position is incredibly safe. Even in the recent tumult, with Assembly leader Hashemi Rafsanjani criticizing the election and following activities, Khamenei has never been in any real danger of losing his position.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
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.
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."
Well, yeah. With Reagan talking about building a spaced-based retaliation system that wouldn't stop a Soviet first strike, but would help reduce their ability to retaliate in a weakened state after a US first strike, assuring the more hawkish members of the Politburo that they would have their revenge no matter what may have been the difference that saved us all from destruction.
It's kind of shocking, really, that the Soviets apparently recognized the danger the extremists among them represented, and designed a system that would placate them. If they had announced it to the world, the US would have had the propaganda running overtime, spinning it as a provocation. As it was, it quietly did it's job and had no effect on the outcome of the Cold War.
I don't care why you're posting AC