Nuclear Weapons? Check. Automatic? Check.
Remember that post from January, Before the Clock Strikes Twelve..? Yeah, neither did I – until I saw that Wired had managed to interview one someone who is most certainly talking about it: (unless the man’s crazy, he has nothing to gain – and we all have plenty to lose)
Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.
. . .
“Yes, I agree, a human could decide in the end not to press the button. But that person is a soldier, isolated in an underground bunker, surrounded by evidence that the enemy has just destroyed his homeland and everyone he knows. Sensors have gone off; timers are ticking. There’s a checklist, and soldiers are trained to follow checklists.” [as opposed to a machine which presses its own buttons, ticks off its own checklist]
- Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
Nicholas Thompson for Wired
2009-09-21
The article concludes as such: Russia has a “dead hand” system. If it works, we’re all nuked. They’re still working on it… and, hopefully, they’re not planning to test.
So that’s what they’re building inside гора Яманта…
… but what the hell are they really building under Tokyo..?
