Before the Clock Strikes Twelve
I was discussing the would-have-been proto-disaster “Y2K” was made out to be with a friend when the subject of the “Dead Hand” system came up – interestingly enough, there is less and less information to suggest that the Soviet retaliatory system was a hoax. There are even some compelling arguments that the Cold War specter of nuclear annihilation has yet to pass.
I still have my money on biological warfare, given the ease of offering plausible denial for a pandemic, but… the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists suggests that we’re five minutes to midnight.
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.
- The Return of the Doomsday Machine? by Ron Rosenbaum
This… bodes well.
Care to read more? Apparently the unknowns outweigh what is known, but here is what I found:
In seeking answers to questions about the purpose of the project at Yamantau Mountain, it appears that the Russian Federation has deliberately misled the United States about the purpose of this facility on a number of occasions. The facility appears to be designed to survive a nuclear war and appears to exceed reasonable defense requirements.
According to Colonel Lunev, Moscow continues to perfect war plans that would assassinate U.S. political and military leaders and sabotage key targets in the United States by using small man-portable nuclear weapons. I should note that Colonel Lunev is a protected witness, and so special arrangements have been made at the hearings today to conceal his identity and provide for his physical security.
… and the rest is scurrilous conjecture.
Welcome back to movie-plot reality.
Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
