The Dead Hand

The missiles at Nizhny Tagil were not yet fueled, so they would not be launched soon, yet the switch to combat alert was met with dread. “It was strangely quiet,” Yarynich recalled. “I cannot forget the mixture of nervousness, surprise and pain on the faces of each operator, without exception—officers, enlisted men, women telephone operators.” In the end, the Cuban crisis was defused, and in Nizhny Tagil, the “BRONTOZAVR” alert expired. But the problem of command and control of nuclear weapons grew more intense as the Soviet leaders threw their resources into building a new generation of missiles, which required new methods of control—the paper packets were obsolete.

The first attempt to automate the command and control system was ready by 1967. It was called “Signal,” and it could transmit thirteen fixed commands from headquarters to the troops, such as telling them to escalate to a higher readiness. The new system could also transmit a cancel order. While a vast improvement over the paper packets, the Signal system did not command the weapons, but rather sent orders to the troops, and they in turn had to operate the weapons. This was still cumbersome and time-consuming. As pressure increased for more speed and streamlining, a second stage of automation was developed in the mid-1970s, known as “Signal-M.” It reached all the way from the top decision-makers to the lowest level in the field. The installation of the new, faster Signal-M came as the Soviet Union put on duty the new generation of missiles, including the giant SS-18. This was the first time the Soviet nuclear command and control featured a remote-control button that could be pushed to launch.⁸

In the Soviet system of the 1970s, the General Staff oversaw the weapons at sea and on bombers, while the Strategic Rocket Forces supervised land-based missiles. At the time, Soviet leaders sitting in the Kremlin did not have a nuclear “football” carried around everywhere they went. The launch apparatus remained with the military branches. The political leaders shared control with the generals.

Yarynich, who worked on Signal-M, often pondered the profound psychological calculus of nuclear weapons command and control. How would real people behave when they had to press the button? How would they make a decision about whether to inflict utter devastation in just minutes? Yarynich recalled another episode he experienced in the mid-1970s when he was working on command and control systems for nuclear weapons. A malfunction occurred in the alert system. An erroneous message was automatically transmitted from the top down to the command posts of all rocket divisions: go one step to a higher alert. Most duty officers in the command posts failed to obey. “People didn’t believe it,” Yarynich said. “We were not at war.” Instead of summoning troops from their barracks to combat sites, they began telephoning their superiors to find out if the message was genuine. Only a lone duty officer, a lieutenant colonel, actually put his unit on alert. The incident revealed a great deal of reluctance in the rocket forces to push any buttons. The duty officers knew, Yarynich said, that “one could not act blindly.”

In order to give a Soviet leader additional precious minutes to make a launch decision, the military strove to build super-fast communications to carry messages from the headquarters right to the missiles themselves. In 1985, Signal-M was upgraded to a computerized system known as Signal-A, which allowed missiles in remote silos to be retargeted directly by the Strategic Rocket Forces main staff. Several different flight plans were stored at the launcher and could be chosen remotely. It would take only ten or fifteen seconds to load a flight plan.⁹ The significance of this was that Soviet authorities would gain speed and bypass uncertainty— the human kind—on the ground. They would skip over any troops who, lacking discipline and burning with curiosity, might be tempted to pick up the phone to ask what was going on. The military designers were being pushed all the time to make the launch system as fast as possible. “The designers said we need it—now it is five minutes, then it will be three, and soon it will be 20 seconds,” Yarynich recalled.

In addition to speed, the designers wanted fail-safe, ironclad security. They knew the flaws of Soviet industry, and the potential for error. Yarynich said they devoted just as much effort to guarding against failure or cheating as they did to gaining speed; they built in rigid procedures, constantly checking for anomalies, up and down the chain.

In 1985, the Soviet designers finished work on a nuclear “football,” in this case a briefcase known as the Cheget. Three were prepared: to accompany the general secretary of the party, the defense minister and chief of the General Staff. However, the Cheget was for information only; it could not be used to launch, and did not have a button to press. The officer carrying the Cheget would plug into a wider communications network, known as Kavkaz, designed just for the national leadership. Then the general secretary could give permission to the military, also plugged into Kavkaz, to launch. This “permission command” would then be transformed into a “direct command” by the General Staff. The direct commands were authenticated, and if proven correct, would become “launch commands” sent to the missiles.

Over the years, as Yarynich worked to build and strengthen these communications systems, he came to see the hair trigger as a dead end, that neither side could gain an edge by just shaving minutes off the decision process. But in 1984, he was doing his job, caught up in the quest for speed.

In the event of nuclear explosions, communications links would be vulnerable to disruption, especially between the headquarters and the missile silo. The Soviet military designers wanted to eliminate that uncertainty. All the previous experience had shown that the traditional cables, radio and satellite channels they had built to carry the data might be suddenly incinerated. They also feared the electromagnetic pulse that would precede a nuclear attack could wipe out all standard communications equipment. Some other means to control the missiles in time of war had to be found.

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One answer was the survivable underground command post in the Ural Mountains, known as Grot, carved out of a mass of granite. The designers had searched long and hard for a site that would allow radio signals to penetrate through the rock. The granite was perfect. Grot was situated at a mountain place known locally as Kosvinsky Kamen, east of Moscow and north of Sverdlovsk.¹⁰ While the mountain bunker was intended to shield the commanders from nuclear war, the designers also created a parallel plan for safely broadcasting the launch orders—via missiles soaring high above the earth.

Missiles had always been a Soviet strength, so it was natural to turn to them to solve the problem of wartime communications. The designers conceived robot-like command missiles that could be kept in super- hardened silos, and then launched quickly at the onset of nuclear war. Instead of a warhead, the command missiles would carry a special nose cone of electronics. Once in flight, safely above the war conditions on the ground, the command missiles would broadcast a message to all the remaining nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles in their silos below: “launch!” Should all else fail, the retaliation command would get through. There was one drawback: the command missiles might take thirty minutes to complete the mission; at that point, all the intercontinental ballistic missiles might be destroyed. Nonetheless, a decision was made to build the system. In utmost secrecy, the Soviet military and civilian designers won approval to start work in 1974. The Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, one of the leading Soviet missile builders in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, was given responsibility for the command rocket.¹¹ The electronics were created at the Special Design Bureau of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, an elite engineering and computer institute. Colonel General Varfolomei Korobushin, first deputy chief of the rocket forces main staff, was in charge of the project for the military. Taken together, the new bunkers and rockets were one of the most creative, astonishing and frightening inventions of the Cold War. It was called Perimeter.¹²

When Yarynich was transferred to the new job in January 1984, he was assigned to Perimeter—then approaching the final year of testing.

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In the logic of nuclear alert, the fate of the Earth would rest on human decisions made in a few fleeting minutes. If Soviet leaders feared an imminent attack, they had three choices. The first option was preemption, to attack first. But such a strike had almost no chance of success—it was just not possible to wipe out the land and sea legs of the American missile force with a preemptive strike. The second option was to launch immediately when a warning was received that enemy missiles were on the way—a warning that would come from the infrared satellites, and then, ten to fifteen minutes later, from ground-based radars. To launch on a warning was to take extraordinary risks. What if the warning was wrong? What if a radar had mistakenly seen a flock of geese? Or if an early-warning satellite had mistakenly seen a glint off the clouds? These kinds of errors were common to both