Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

[Tuffty]

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.

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

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.

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It's a fascinating article. Scary to think it's still active!

[Mucca]

I read that a couple of weeks ago. Definitely scary.

Dr. Strangelove is one of my all-time favorite movies, and now to find out it was so close to the truth is pretty damn weird.

[shadowstar]

So... is it basically like a really huge omfg-we're-all-dead bomb?

[Mucca]

Not a bomb...a computer system capable of nuclear counterstrike. But while it does have a nuclear arsenal at its disposal, it supposedly cannot be activated without at least some form of human confirmation. But it only takes one crazy, paranoid person to set things in motion if it comes to that point.

But yeah, the end result would be omfg-we're-all-dead. Or at least most of us, especially if you're living in the U.S. (which is probably where most of the missiles are aimed).

[kuro808]

Fun, an active machine to bomb the shit out of us