superpowers. No one wanted to launch nuclear missiles because of a flock of geese. Nonetheless, in the tense standoff of the early 1980s, launch on warning was not dismissed out of hand. The third option was to retaliate only when under attack. Among the Soviet leadership, this was also considered a realistic scenario, especially after they achieved rough parity in missiles with the United States in the 1970s. But launch under attack carried its own risks: what if they didn’t survive to retaliate? In this supreme test of human behavior, a hair-trigger decision to launch a nuclear missile attack was one that theorists and planners simply could not fathom nor reliably predict. It was almost impossible to know whether a leader would launch on warning, and take the risk of firing too soon, or wait for an attack, and take the chance of decapitation and destruction.
Out of such imponderable choices arose yet another aspect of Perimeter. What if the ailing Chernenko could not decide whether to shoot first, or be shot? What if he was wiped out before he could decide? The Soviet designers responded with an ingenious and incredible answer. They built a Doomsday Machine that would guarantee retaliation—launch all the nuclear missiles—if Chernenko’s hand went limp.
In effect, the designers created a command system—a switch—that gave Chernenko the option not to decide on retaliation. If he turned on the switch, the system would pass the decision to someone else. Thus, an ailing general secretary might avoid the mistake of launching all missiles based on a false alarm. Should the enemy missiles actually arrive and destroy the Kremlin, the general secretary could be certain there would be retaliation. According to Yarynich, the logic was to take the immense burden of a sudden, shoot-or-die decision off the shoulders of the Soviet leader, especially someone as feeble as Brezhnev or Chernenko. If retaliation was necessary, that decision would be slightly delayed and transferred to a survivor. The immense burden was shifted to a few duty officers who might still be alive in a concrete bunker. They would face the big decision about destroying what remained of the planet.
This was not only a concept, but an elaborate program which took a decade to build. It was Perimeter.
Buried within the idea was an even deeper and more frightening concept that the Soviet leaders considered: a totally automated, computer-driven retaliatory system known as the Dead Hand. It would still function if
The Perimeter system, however, was constructed. In the early moments of a nuclear crisis, the order might come from the General Staff, or perhaps from the underground command post at
Deep in the globes, the officers had a checklist of three conditions to monitor as the minutes ticked by. Condition 1: Verify the Perimeter system was activated. This activation meant that the military commanders or the Kremlin had given advance permission for the system to fire. Condition 2: Check whether contact had been lost with the military and political leaders. If the lines went out, if the hand was dead, this meant decapitation. Condition 3: Determine whether nuclear detonations were being felt by a network of special sensors that measured light, radioactivity, seismic shocks and atmospheric overpressure.
If all three of these conditions were met—the system was activated, the leaders were dead and the nuclear bombs were detonating—then from inside the globe, the officers were supposed to issue a command to launch the Perimeter command rockets, which would fly for about thirty minutes and order all the remaining nuclear-armed missiles of the Soviet Union to launch, aimed at the United States.15
The officers buried in the globe were the last human decision-makers in a chain that was now ultrafast and largely automated. If they acted as they had been ordered, Perimeter would unleash a spasm of destruction. “Thus, there was no need for anyone to push a button,” said Korobushin. Much would rest on the thinking of the officers in the globe. Yarynich often wondered whether the men in the bunkers at this point would follow orders or defy them. Did the men in the bunker give it one last layer of sanity, the possibility of saying no to mass destruction? Yarynich thought they did. “We have a young lieutenant colonel sitting there, communications are destroyed, and he hears ‘boom,’ ‘boom,’ everything is shaking—he might fail to launch. If he doesn’t begin the launching procedure there will be no retaliation. What’s the point of doing it if half the globe has already been wiped out? To destroy the second part? It makes no sense. Even at this point, this lieutenant colonel might say, ‘No, I won’t launch it.’ No one will condemn him for it or put him before a firing squad. If I were in his place, I wouldn’t launch.” But Yarynich added that no one could predict how the duty officer would react in such an extraordinary moment, at the edge of the abyss.
Another way to look at Perimeter, however, is more ominous: the duty officers are just another cog in an automatic, regimented system. If the duty officers are drilled over and over again to follow the checklist, and if the highest authorities had given the permission from the top, and if all three conditions on the checklist are met, wouldn’t they naturally do as they had been trained to do? In the
If the Americans had known of Perimeter—if they realized that decapitation of the Kremlin would trigger near-automatic retaliation—it might have given them pause. It might have been a deterrent. But in the peculiar dark world of the arms race, the Soviets treated the Perimeter project as super-secret, and tried to mask what they had invented. The Perimeter command missiles were cleverly disguised to look like ordinary missiles so they could not be detected by satellites.
“We hid it,” Yarynich said. “We should have announced from the very beginning, here it is, we are having trials. But we hid it. If you don’t know about it, it’s bad. It means you might take a decisive step, and then what?” This prospect worried Yarynich for many years.
On November 13, 1984, the Soviet military carried out a major test of Perimeter. The Leningrad design bureau simulated the General Staff command post. A signal was sent to a low-frequency transmitter in Moscow. Then the signal was transmitted to the command rocket at the Kapustin Yar test range on the banks of the Volga River in southern Russia. The command rocket took off and flew toward Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan. Along the entire flight, the command rocket delivered the launch order, as a test, and receivers were listening across the country. During the test, Yarynich watched reports come in; some signals were stronger, others weaker.
Among other locations, the command rocket signal was received by an intercontinental ballistic missile located at the Tyuratam test range, also in Kazakhstan. The missile was poised to launch. In conditions of nuclear war, it would have lifted from the silo immediately, but the Soviet officials delayed it during the test because they suspected American satellites were monitoring every move. A while later, the big missile launched and flew to the Kamchatka Peninsula, hitting a target there.16
The test was a success, and the system was put on combat duty in the new year, 1985.
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MORNING AGAIN IN AMERICA
Ronald Reagan opened 1984 with bold declarations of an American renaissance. “America is back” with “renewed energy and optimism,” he said in the State of the Union address on January 25. He urged the American people to “send away the hand-wringers and doubting Thomases,” and added, “The cynics were wrong—America never was a sick society.” Polls showed Reagan enjoyed high public approval ratings. The mood of the country was upbeat despite the collapsed nuclear arms talks with the Soviets, a misadventure in Lebanon and record budget deficits. Reagan’s optimism had been a tonic for the debilitating years of Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostages
