[tt] [x-risk] Soviet's nuclear Doomsday Machine may still be in place

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu> -----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:42:10 -0400
To: For discussion of existential risks <existential at transhumanism.org>
Subject: [x-risk] Soviet's nuclear Doomsday Machine may still be in place
Reply-To: For discussion of existential risks <existential at transhumanism.org>

http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/

The Return of the Doomsday Machine?
Please don't count on me to save the world again.

By Ron Rosenbaum

Posted Friday, Aug. 31, 2007, at 3:52 PM ET
Nuclear bomb testNuclear bomb test

"The nuclear doomsday machine." It's a Cold War term that has long
seemed obsolete.

And even back then, the "doomsday machine" was regarded as a scary
conjectural fiction. Not impossible to create-the physics and mechanics
of it were first spelled out by U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard-but
never actually created, having a real existence only in such apocalyptic
nightmares as Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.

In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that
automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs
pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system's sensors
detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or
(as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the
doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make
the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human
hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.

An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men
and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been
merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and
activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there
is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.

Instead, something was reactivated in Russia last week. I'm referring to
the ominous announcement-given insufficient attention by most U.S. media
(the Economist made it the opening of a lead editorial on Putin's
Russia)-by Vladimir Putin that Russia has resumed regular "strategic
flights" of nuclear bombers. (They may or may not be carrying nuclear
bombs, but you can practically hear Putin's smirking tone as he says,
"Our [nuclear bomber] pilots have been grounded for too long. They are
happy to start a new life.")

These twin developments raise a troubling question: What are the United
States' and Russia's current nuclear policies with regard to how and
when they will respond to a perceived nuclear attack? In most accounts,
once the president or Russian premier receives radar warning of an
attack, they have less than 15 minutes to decide whether the warning is
valid. The pressure is on to "use it or lose it"-launch our missiles
before they can be destroyed in their silos. Pressure that makes the
wrong decision more likely. Pressure that makes accidental nuclear war a
real possibility.

Once you start to poke into this matter, you discover a disturbing level
of uncertainty, which leads me to believe we should be demanding that
the United States and Russia define and defend their nuclear postures.
Bush and Putin should be compelled to tell us just what "failsafe"
provisions are installed on their respective nuclear bombers, missiles,
and submarines-what the current provisions against warning malfunctions
are and what kinds of controls there are over the ability of lone madman
nuclear bombers to bring on the unhappy end of history.

As for the former Soviet Union, the possible existence of a version of a
doomsday machine is both relevant and disturbing.

In the Strangelove film, the Soviet ambassador tells the president and
generals in the U.S. war room that the device was designed to deter a
surprise attack, the kind of attack that might otherwise prevent
retaliation by "decapitating" the Soviet command structure. The
automated system would insure massive world-destroying retaliation even
if the entire Soviet leadership were wiped out-or had second thoughts.
As a result, some referred to it as the "dead hand" doomsday device.

It is Dr. Strangelove himself, the madman U.S. nuclear strategist played
by Peter Sellers, who detects the flaw in this plan. After being
apprised of the system's existence by the Soviet ambassador, and the
likelihood of its being triggered by a U.S. bomber on an unauthorized
mission to nuke its Soviet target, Dr. Strangelove exclaims:

    Yes, but the ... whole point of the doomsday machine ... is lost ...
if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?

In other words, a doomsday machine kept secret is no good for
deterrence, only for retaliation by extinction.

Did the Soviets actually design a variation on a doomsday device and not
tell us about it? And could an accidental or terrorist nuclear attack on
Putin's Russia (by Chechens, for instance) trigger an antiquated
automated dead-hand system and launch missiles capable of killing tens,
maybe hundreds, of millions at unknown targets that might include the
United States?

Up until Aug. 10 of this year, I would have thought these questions were
best consigned to the realm of apocalyptic film fantasy. But on that day
I came upon a startling essay in the London Times Literary Supplement.
It was a review (titled "Deadly Devices") of a book recently published
in the United Kingdom: Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the
Dream of the Superweapon by nuclear-age historian P.D. Smith of
University College London. (It will be out in the United States in
December.)

The TLS reviewer, Christopher Coker (who is on the faculty of the London
School of Economics), asserted that the book demonstrates that "only
after the Berlin Wall had been breached and ... the Cold War began to
thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a
version of the [doomsday] device. The details of this top-secret Soviet
system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American
ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts
on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American
submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in 13 minutes, the
Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated
communication network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its
heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr. Strangelove. Its
code name was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is
still in place."

Wait a minute. Still in place?! How is this possible?

In the endnotes of Smith's book (which turns out to be an illuminating
portrait of the Doomsday weapon concept and its cultural implications),
I found a reference to a further description of the Perimetr system in a
2003 Washington Post op-ed by Bruce G. Blair, the former Minuteman ICBM
launch control officer who first revealed the existence of the program.
(When he wrote the op-ed, he was a Brookings fellow; he is now head of
the World Security Institute in Washington, a liberal think tank.)

The op-ed offers a far more detailed and chilling picture of Perimetr
than the brief mention devoted to it in the book and review:

    Die-hard [U.S.] nuclear war planners actually have their eyes on
targets in Russia and China, including missile silos and leadership
bunkers. For these planners, the Cold War never ended. Their top two
candidates [i.e., targets] in Russia are located inside the Yamantau and
Kosvinsky mountains in the central and southern Urals.

    Both were huge construction projects begun in the late 1970s, when
U.S. nuclear firepower took special aim at the Communist Party's
leadership complex. Fearing a decapitating strike, the Soviets sent tens
of thousands of workers to these remote sites, where U.S. spy satellites
spotted them still toiling away in the late 1990s.

Blair sources his information on these command bunkers to "diagrams and
notes given to me in the late 1990s by SAC [Strategic Air Command]
senior officers," men in charge of targeting our missile and bomber
forces.

>From them, he paints a Strangelovian picture:

    The Yamantau command center is inside a rock quartz mountain, about
3,000 feet straight down from the summit. It is a wartime relocation
facility for the top Russian political leadership. It is more a shelter
than a command post, because the facility's communications links are
relatively fragile. As it turned out, the quartz interferes with radio
signals broadcast from inside the mountain. 

A quartz nuclear-war mountain! Something phantasmal about it, like a
satanic big rock candy mountain. But the quartz mountain melts in
comparison with the Perimetr dead-hand system at Kosvinsky.

"Kosvinsky," Blair tells us, "is regarded by U.S. targeteers as the
crown jewel of the Russian wartime nuclear command system, because it
can communicate through the granite mountain to far-flung Russian
strategic forces using very-low-frequency (VLF) radio signals that can
burn through a nuclear war environment. The facility is the critical
link to Russia's 'dead hand' communications network, designed to ensure
semi-automatic retaliation to a decapitating strike."

Of course, there's a world of difference between a "semi-automatic"
doomsday device and the totally automatic-beyond human control-doomsday
device in Strangelove, something that Blair is careful to note. The
Soviet facility does require a human hand for the final fatal push of
the button. But Blair believes that the human brain behind that hand has
not been programmed to suddenly turn peacenik. And the details of the
device are far from reassuring.

"This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984, during the
height of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of
creative engineering." According to Blair, if Perimetr senses a nuclear
explosion in Russian territory and then receives no communication from
Moscow, it will assume the incapacity of human leadership in Moscow or
elsewhere, and will then grant a single human being deep within the
Kosvinsky mountains the authority and capability to launch the entire
Soviet nuclear arsenal.

"Kosvinsky came online recently," Blair wrote in 2003, "which could be
one explanation for U.S. interest in a new nuclear bunker buster."

Blair also suggested that the Bush administration's recurrent interest
in funding the development of nuclear "bunker buster" bombs was at least
in some respects designed to give them the capacity to destroy the
dead-hand device buried deep in a Kosvinsky bunker, an argument that, if
true, would suggest the dead-hand doomsday device was still thought to
be operational. And perhaps you've heard something about its
deactivation, but I haven't found any evidence of it.

Blair, who has written previously on the extremely rickety structure of
presidential nuclear decision-making, believes that the current U.S.
contingency plan is itself a "doomsday strategy":

    President Bush's nuclear guidance doubtless instructs the Pentagon
to plan the destruction of Yamantau and Kosvinsky, along with 2,000
other targets in Russia and hundreds more in China. But such targeting
requires very high-yield weapons, typically 10 to 100 times more
destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. We are talking
about a doomsday plan in which Yamantau and Kosvinsky are struck as part
of an all-out nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of
people. 

There's some ambiguity in Blair's use of "doubtless": Does it imply that
Bush's "nuclear guidance" includes only one all-out, 2,000-target
response, or "merely" the capability of it? But shouldn't we know at
least that in a genuinely "doubtless" way?

Blair's primary recent concern is not the prospect of a deliberate,
ideological, Cold War-type nuclear war, but accidental war caused by the
continued deadly presence of all-too-easily triggered Cold War arsenals.
In four fascinating papers on the subject (all available online, and
well worth reading), Blair describes the "launch on warning" bias built
into our nuclear command structure, and foresees the possibility of a
doomsday that results from our attempt to pre-empt their doomsday plan,
all of which might be touched off by accident, mistake, or malfunction
on either side.

Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions.
Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar
raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert on the Russian
military at MIT, told the Times that Blair "requires of himself a much
higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence
community."

Blair's troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental
Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and
vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command
and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when
the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we
may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.

It was Blair who pointed out, in congressional testimony, another
continuing problem with nuclear launch posture, this one involving the
much-ballyhooed "de-targeting"-a process by which the United States and
the former Soviet Union purportedly reduced the risk of accidental
nuclear war by insuring that their missiles were-after the fall of the
Soviet Union-not still targeted at each other. Blair told Congress that,
especially on the Russian side, detargeting was only "cosmetic and
symbolic," and easily reversible, implemented in name only.

What drove Blair? I was particularly fascinated by one of Blair's other
papers, his more personal "Nuclear Recollections," which might have been
called "Memories of a Minuteman Missile Crewman," and describes his
period of service in a missile silo at the Malmstrom, Mont., Air Force
Base, hundreds of feet beneath the Great Plains.

Especially because I'd been there! Down in one of those silos, under the
bleak landscape of the Great Plains (this one in Grand Forks, N.D.),
interviewing missile commanders like Blair (for a Harper's story), only
a few years after Blair resumed life aboveground and retired.

In the course of talking to Minuteman commanders down in their
underground launch capsules, I'd glimpsed what they might be called upon
to do. They had the ability to launch from their underground pods up to
50 missiles able to kill 200,000 or 300,000 people each. You do the
math.

They certainly had, and it showed beneath their black-humored jokes
about coming above ground after a nuclear war and finding "only huge
mutant bunny rabbits alive."

They were, thank God, not automatons. As Blair points out, their
training system was designed to turn them into automatic button pushers,
but the ones I spoke to retained a sharp sense of skeptical
individuality. About the gravity of their "mission": killing that many
people. And about the sketchy mechanics of it.

One crew member even disclosed to me a flaw in the "command and control"
"permissive action" system that was supposed to prevent a madman missile
commander from launching his "birds" and starting an apocalyptic nuclear
war all by himself. The flaw: the system's susceptibility to the "spoon
and string" improvisation.

So much focus has been placed-in film, fiction, and nonfiction-on our
supposedly "failsafe" barrier to a lone-madman launch. We'd been told
that to launch a missile, two keys must be inserted simultaneously into
their slots by two separate launch officers, and that the slots for the
keys were located at a sufficient distance from each other that one
madman couldn't, say, shoot the other crewman and then use both his arms
to twist both the keys simultaneously.

But the missile crewmen I talked to told me they'd figured out a way to
defeat that impediment with a spoon and a string. Not that they were
planning to do it, but that they knew someone could do it.

You just shoot the other guy and "rig up a thing where you tie a string
to one end of a spoon," he told me, "and tie the other end to the guy's
key. Then you can sit in your chair and twist your key with one hand
while you yank on the spoon with the other hand to twist the other key
over."

American ingenuity! Can't beat it for finding a new way to end the
world.

I always wondered if I should follow up on what happened after I
published this information. (In a piece reprinted in The Secret Parts of
Fortune, I assumed the flaw had been fixed somehow, and have long
credited myself with saving the world. Kidding!)

I actually turned down an invitation to lecture about such matters from
the Air War College in Alabama* (because of my peacenik inclinations at
the time), and assumed that if they read the article, they must have
taken action to save the world from a lone madman with a spoon and
string, to whom I'd in effect given instructions for an unauthorized
missile launch that could destroy the world. (Hmmm, maybe I'd come close
to destroying the world, rather than saving it. Sorry about that.)

But it's clear from Bruce Blair's "Nuclear Recollections" that the
experience of holding the lives of tens of millions in his hands when he
held those keys left a profound mark on him. I know that when the
missile crewmen I was interviewing let me hold the keys, even twist them
into the (deactivated) locks, that it had a profound effect on me. The
keys to Kingdom Come!

And while I may have abandoned my responsibility for too long, I was
grateful that Bruce G. Blair was still on the case, raising the right
questions. In fact, he's devoted his subsequent life to raising the
alarm about our flawed nuclear alarm and launch system, using what an
actual missile commander learned about its dysfunctions and biases.

Blair's work continues and I think it's urgent, now that Putin's
"nuclear bombers" are flying again, that Congress re-examine the whole
issue and take seriously Blair's warnings about the variations of
doomsday we still face.

Pay attention to Blair. You can't count on me to save the world again.

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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