geo2
16-09-2007, 10:04 AM
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."
for the whole article: please go to...................
http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/
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."
for the whole article: please go to...................
http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/