Doomsday MachineRevelations of the developer of a nuclear war plan. Inside the Soviet Doomsday Machine, the Americans also tried to do something similar.
One of the most monstrous inventions of the Cold War was designed to completely destroy life on earth in a global hara-kiri. It is possible that even now somewhere else his timer is ticking, counting the last hours of our world.
However, whether it actually exists is unknown. And if it exists, then no one can say what the sinister doomsday machine .
Because this is the collective name of a certain weapon that can wipe humanity off the face of the earth - and maybe even destroy the planet itself.
The authors of this title were science fiction writers, and for the first time it sounded in the film by Stanley Kubrick "Doctor Strangelove" (1963). The very same idea is rooted in the depths of centuries, when the losing battles preferred collective suicide to capitulation. Preferably with enemies. That is why the last surviving defenders blew up the powder magazines of fortresses and ships.
But those were isolated cases of unprecedented heroism. Blow up the whole world then did not occur to anyone. First, hardly anyone was so bloodthirsty or fell into such despair. Secondly, with all the desire, he would not have been able to drag the whole world with him into the grave - because he did not have the necessary weapons. All this appeared only in the 20th century.
The attitude to their defeat in World War II among European countries was very different.
Denmark, for example, capitulated immediately after the Nazis entered its territory - and surrendered without resistance. Which, however, did not prevent her from then receiving the status of a member of the "anti-Hitler coalition." But Hungary was so loyal to Germany that it resisted us to the last - and all the Hungarian men of military age went to the front.
Germany itself, since the end of 1944, was only making its feet, panickingly retreating from the Red Army. A few months before the fall of Berlin, one and a half million enemy soldiers surrendered, and the Volksturm detachments fled.
Enraged by the unwillingness of his people to fight to the death, Hitler ordered the Berlin subway to be flooded in order to drown the Germans hiding there along with the Soviet soldiers who had broken through there. Thus, the locks of the Spree River became one of the prototypes of the Doomsday Machine.
And then came nuclear weapons. As long as there were hundreds of warheads, and the means of their delivery were "antediluvian", both the USA and the USSR believed that it was possible to win a nuclear war. You just need to strike first in time - or repel the enemy's attack (knocking down planes and missiles), and "bang" in response.
But at the same time, the risk of being a victim of the first blow (and losing miserably) was so great that the idea of \u200b\u200bdreadful retribution was born.
You ask, weren't the rockets fired in response such revenge? No.
First, a surprise strike from the enemy will disable half of your nuclear arsenal. Secondly, it will partially reflect your retaliatory strike. And thirdly, nuclear warheads with a yield of 100 kilotons to 2 megatons are intended only for the destruction of military and industrial facilities. They cannot send America to the bottom of the ocean.
Had a nuclear war erupted in the early 1960s, much of the US territory would have remained untouched, and on it, in a favorable scenario, the United States could have been resurrected. Deprived of their industrial areas, surrounded by radioactive deserts - but still revived. The Soviet Union would have survived in the same way. And other countries of the world could generally survive the Third World War almost safely - and who knows, maybe one of them would have pulled ahead and become a “world hegemon”.
Irreconcilable heads in Washington and Moscow could not agree with this. And they began to create weapons, after the use of which there were neither winners, not defeated, nor passive observers in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Soviet Union was the first to make it - having tested on Novaya Zemlya a hydrogen bomb of monstrous power (over 50 megatons), known in the West as "Kuzka's mother" .
It was meaningless as a weapon of war - too powerful and too heavy to be airlifted to American soil. But she was ideally suited as the very powder magazine that would have blown up the last surviving defenders of the Land of the Soviets.
Stanley Kubrick got Nikita Khrushchev's hint right. And his Doomsday Machine was 50 nuclear (cobalt) bombs laid like land mines in different parts of the world. The explosion of which would make life on the planet impossible for a century.
In the novel "Swan's Song" writer Robert McCammon, super-powerful hydrogen bombs were located on special space platforms "Heavenly Claws". They were supposed to automatically, a few months after the defeat of the United States, drop their cargo on the poles. Monstrous explosions would not only melt the ice caps, causing a new worldwide flood, but would also shift the earth's axis.
Science fiction predictions, as you know, sometimes come true. And sometimes they borrow interesting ideas. Rumors about Soviet thermonuclear land mines planted off the coast of the United States, as well as on the territory of the USSR itself (in case of occupation) have been circulating since the days of Perestroika. No one, of course, has not confirmed or denied them.
However, by the beginning of the 1980s, the size of nuclear arsenals had reached such proportions that their use, even with the deduction of those destroyed, would have led to global radioactive contamination of the planet. Well, plus it would have immersed her for several years in the so-called. "nuclear winter". So the Doomsday Machine might not be needed.
But instead of the question, how to destroy the planet, the question arose, how to do it? And here in the mid-80s, according to weapons expert Bruce G. Blair and the author of the book "The Doomsday People" P. D. Smith, the Soviet nuclear strike control system arose. "Perimeter" . Representing something like "Skynet" from the famous Cameron film. Agree, it is quite drawn to the title of "apocalypse machine"!
However, the main part of the Soviet, and now the Russian defensive system, according to the above authors, was the Kosvinsky Stone command center. According to their description, behind this name in the depths of the Ural Mountains lies a huge bunker with a special "nuclear button".
It can only be pressed by one person, a certain officer, if he receives confirmation from the Perimeter system that a nuclear war has begun and Moscow has been destroyed, and government bunkers have been destroyed. And then the question of retribution will be completely in his hands.
Surely, it is not an easy task to be left alone when your entire country is destroyed, and in one movement send the rest of the world to hell. By the way, this situation is played out in the episode "Dead Man's Button" fantasy series "Beyond the possible".
It must be said that the concept of the Doomsday Machine has brought considerable benefits. The threat of mutual destruction somewhat cooled the hotheads - and mainly thanks to her, the Third World War did not start. For now
But even Skynet could not destroy all people with nuclear weapons alone - and he had to finish off the survivors with the help of terminators. Therefore, in search "ultimate weapon" (the term was coined by science fiction writer Robert Sheckley) theorists and practitioners delved into the jungle of exact sciences.
In 1950, the American physicist Leo Szilard proposed the idea cobalt bomb - a type of nuclear weapon that, when detonated, creates a huge amount of radioactive materials, turning the area into a super-Chernobyl. No one dared to create and test it - the fear of the consequences was too great. However, for a long time the cobalt bomb was predicted to be the "absolute weapon".
In the 1960s there were neutron charges - in which 80% of the energy of the explosion is spent on the radiation of a powerful neutron flux. The well-known nursery rhyme describes the consequences of the use of neutron charges quite accurately: the school is standing - and there is nobody in it!
However, the possibilities of radiation seemed somewhat limited to someone - compared, for example, with artificially created stamps of deadly bacteria and viruses.
The "modernized" causative agents of Ebola or Asian flu with almost 100% lethality seemed to them a more effective means of eliminating humanity.
So, for example, from the Spanish flu virus more people died in 1918-1919 than during the entire First World War. What if the dreaded strain of African streptococcus, on which a person rots alive for several hours, was given the ability to travel through the air?
What is being created and has already been created in the secret laboratories of the Pentagon has long been of concern to the townsfolk and provides rich food for the imagination of writers (read "Confrontation"
Stephen King). But even the most dangerous bacilli will seem like a runny nose compared to what the so-called. "Grey Slime" . No, it has nothing to do with the all-devouring "biomass" from the Soviet science fiction film "Through hardships to the stars", since it does not consist of proteins and proteins, but of myriads of microscopic nanorobots .
Capable of self-reproducing (building their copies) by processing any suitable raw material that comes across them on the way. The idea of such nanorobots was submitted in 1986 by one of the founders of nanotechnology Eric Drexler . In his book "Machines of Creation", he suggested a variant when, for some reason, self-reproducing nanorobots will be free and will begin to use plants, animals, and people as raw materials for replication. “Sturdy, omnivorous 'bacteria' could out-compete real bacteria by wind-blown like pollen, multiplying rapidly and turning the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and fast-spreading for us to stop.”
According to Drekler's calculations, less than two days will be enough for nanorobots to completely destroy the surface of the planet. It will be a real Apocalypse! Interestingly, long before Drekler, Polish science fiction writer Stanislav Lem already described a similar scenario in the story "Invincible" - only there the nanorobots did not gobble up, but simply destroyed civilization on one of the planets.
Thus, invisible to the naked eye, tiny robots claim the title of the most ideal version of the Doomsday Machine. And, given that developments in the field of nanotechnology are being accelerated all over the world (in Russia, Putin himself declared them a priority in science), then fantasy can become reality in the very near future.
There is one consolation: the all-destroying Doomsday Machine holds back hotheads from sudden steps and, in fact, is the main guarantee of peace.
post apocalypse- a genre of fantasy literature that models the life of mankind. In some cases, nuclear war becomes the cause of general devastation, in others, natural disasters, man-made disasters, or even disaster from outer space. Over the past decade, the popularity of this genre has grown markedly, at the moment, thousands of post-apocalyptic books have already been created. Some authors write within the framework of the post-nucleus, others - social, philosophical. It can even be an apocalyptic fantasy or a hit in the world after a nuclear war. From year to year, new items written in the post-apocalypse only prove how wide the scope of this direction is.
Features of books in the genre 2019
The post-apocalypse is characterized by surviving in a post-nuclear world. There is a place for both action and reflections of heroes, both bloodthirsty mutants and in protective suits, and interesting descriptions of life and the world order of society after a nuclear war. The best post-apocalyptic books of 2019 show purposeful heroes who are ready to fight for life no matter what. It can be both men and women, both cold-blooded fighters and civilians in the past. Reading post-apocalyptic fiction means feeling how the survivors are fighting for existence, building a new world on the ruins of a former civilization. The relevance of the genre does not fade away: our world at any moment can become buried under the ashes of world wars. Post-apocalyptic not only gives an idea of what will happen after the End of the World, but also opens up a whole palette of decisions on how to survive in a harsh world.
The technical name of the system is "Perimeter", but many called it "Dead Hand". Illustration: Ryan Kelly.
Valery Yarynich casts nervous glances over his shoulder. Dressed in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel squatted in the back of a dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington. It's March 2009 - the Berlin Wall fell two decades ago, but thin and fit Yarynich is as nervous as an informant on the run from the KGB. He begins to speak almost in a whisper, softly but firmly.
“The Perimeter system is very, very good,” he says. “We are removing the greatest responsibility from the top politicians and the military.” He looks around again.
Yarynich talks about the Russian doomsday machine. It is, in fact, a real doomsday mechanism, a functioning perfect weapon that has always been thought to exist only in the fevered fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid White House hawks. Historian Lewis Mumford calls it "the central symbol of the scientifically orchestrated nightmare of mass destruction". Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces and the Soviet General Staff, helped build the system.
The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the Kremlin, the Ministry of Defense were destroyed, communications were disrupted, and all the military were killed, ground sensors would detect that a crushing blow had been dealt and launched the Perimeter system.
The technical name of the system was "Perimeter", but some called it "Dead Hand". It was built 30 years ago and remained a secret with seven seals. With the collapse of the USSR, the very name of the system leaked to the West, but then few people noticed it. Although Yarynich and a former Minuteman missile launcher named Bruce Blair have written about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, the fact of its existence has not penetrated into the public consciousness or into the corridors of power. The Russian side still doesn't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels, including former senior officials in the State Department and the White House, say they've never heard of it. When former CIA director James Woolsey was told about this, his eyes turned cold.
“God forbid that the Soviets were prudent,” he said.
The Dead Hand remains shrouded in mystery to this day, and Yarinich worries that his continued outspokenness is putting him at risk. His fears are probably justified: One Soviet official who spoke to the Americans about the system died after falling down a flight of stairs. But Yarynich is still taking risks. He believes the world should know about Dead Hand. If only because, after all, it still exists.
The system became operational in 1985, after some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Throughout the 1970s, the USSR steadily increased its nuclear power and eventually interrupted the long-term US leadership in this area. At the same time, after the Vietnam War, America seemed weak and depressed. Then Ronald Reagan came to power, with his promises that the recession days were over. It was morning in America, he said, but twilight in the Soviet Union.
Part of the new president's tough approach was to make the Soviets believe that the US was not afraid of nuclear war. Many of his advisers have long advocated the simulation and active planning of nuclear war. These were the followers of Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking the Unthinkable. They believed that the side with the largest arsenal and the strongest willingness to use it would have the leverage in any crisis.
Either you launch first or you convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you are dead. Illustration: Ryan Kelly
The new administration began to actively expand the US nuclear arsenal and put launchers on alert. In a Senate affirmative hearing in 1981, Eugene Rostov, as he took office as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, made it clear that the US might just be mad enough to use its weapons. At the same time, he stated that Japan "not only survived, but also prospered after the 1945 nuclear attack." Speaking of a possible US-Soviet nuclear conflict, he said that “according to some estimates, there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100,000,000 on the other. But that's not the whole population."
Meanwhile, in big and small, US behavior towards the Soviets has taken on a tougher character. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was stripped of his reserved parking pass at the State Department. American troops have landed on tiny Grenada to defeat Communism in Operation Fury. American naval exercises were moving ever closer to Soviet waters.
This strategy worked. Moscow soon believed that the new US leadership was indeed ready to wage a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now ready to start it. “The policies of the Reagan administration must be seen as adventurous and serving the purpose of world domination,” Soviet Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov said at a meeting of the Warsaw Pact Chiefs of Staff in September 1982.
“In 1941, there were also many among us who warned against war and those who did not believe that war was coming. Thus, the situation is not only very serious, but also very dangerous,” Ogarkov said, referring to the Nazi invasion of the USSR.
A few months later, Reagan made one of the most provocative statements of the Cold War. He announced that the US intends to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to protect against Soviet warheads. He called it missile defense. Critics dubbed it "Star Wars".
For Moscow, this was confirmation that the US was planning an attack. It would have been impossible for the shield to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at the same time, so missile defense only made sense as a way to clean up after the initial US strike. First, the United States, by launching thousands of warheads, destroys Soviet cities and missile silos. A certain number of Soviet missiles will survive for a return launch, but the Reagan shield will be able to block many of them. In this way, Star Wars nullified the long-standing doctrines of mutually assured destruction, the principle that ensures neither side starts a nuclear war because neither survives a counterattack.
As we now know, Reagan did not plan the first strike. According to his personal diaries and personal letters, he sincerely believed that he brought lasting peace. (Reagan once told Gorbachev that he might be the reincarnation of the man who invented the first shield.) The system, Reagan insisted, was purely defensive. But according to the logic of the Cold War, if you think the enemy is going to strike, you must do one of two things: either strike first, or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you are dead.
The Perimeter provides the ability to strike back, but it is not an instant response device. It is in a semi-sleep mode until it is turned on by a high-ranking official in a military crisis. Then the monitoring of the readings of the network of seismic, radiation and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions begins. Before launching a retaliatory strike, the system must answer four if/then questions: if it was enabled, then it must try to determine whether a nuclear weapon actually hit Soviet soil. Then the system will check if there is a connection with the General Staff. If it is, and if a certain amount of time - only 15 minutes to an hour - has passed without further signs of an attack, the machine will assume that the military is still alive and there is someone to order a counterattack, after which it turns off. But if the line to the General Staff is dead, then the perimeter concludes that the Apocalypse has come. Then she immediately transfers launch rights to whoever is on duty at that moment deep inside the protected bunker. At this moment, the opportunity to destroy the world is given to the person on duty: maybe a minister, or maybe a 25-year-old junior officer, fresh out of a military school. And if that person decides to press the button... If/Then. If/then. If/then. If/then.
Once launched, the counterattack is controlled by so-called command missiles. Sheltered in shielded launchers designed for massive blasts and the electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear blast, these missiles would launch first and then transmit a coded order to any surviving arsenal after the first strike. Flying over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the Motherland, and all the destroyed land, a team of missiles will destroy the United States.
The US also tried to master these technologies, in particular, the deployment of command missiles in the so-called emergency missile interaction system. They also developed seismic and radiation sensors to monitor nuclear testing and explosions around the world. But the US did not combine all this into a system of zombie retribution. They were afraid of accidents and a fatal mistake that could end the whole world.
Instead, US aircrews with retaliatory capabilities and authority patrolled the airspace during the Cold War. Their mission was similar to the Perimeter, but the system was more human-based than machine-based.
And in accordance with the rules of the Cold War game, the United States announced it to the USSR. The first mention of the Doomsday Machine was in an NBC radio broadcast in February 1950, when atomic scientist Leo Szilard described a hypothetical hydrogen bomb system that could turn the world into radioactive dust.
A decade and a half later, the hero of Stanley Kubrick's satirical masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, tried to introduce this idea into the public consciousness. In the film, an American general sends a bomber to launch a preemptive strike against the USSR. The Soviet ambassador claims that his country has just deployed a device that will automatically respond to any nuclear attack.
“The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” Dr. Strangelove screams. Why didn't you tell the world?
After all, such a device only works as a deterrent if the enemy is aware of its existence. In the film, the Soviet ambassador only replies, "It should have been announced at the party congress on Monday."
In real life, however, many Mondays and many party conventions have passed since Perimeter was created. So why didn't the USSR tell the world about it, or at least the White House? There is no evidence that senior Reagan administration officials knew anything about the Soviet doomsday plan. George Shultz, Secretary of State for most of Reagan's term, said he had never heard of her.
Indeed, the Soviet military did not even inform its own civilian negotiator to limit nuclear weapons in Europe.
“I was never told about Perimeter,” says Yuli Kvitsinsky, who negotiated with the Soviet side at the time the system was created. And today no one will talk about it. In addition to Yarynich, several other people confirmed the existence of the system, but most questions about this still stumble upon a sharp “no”. In an interview in Moscow in February of this year with Vladimir Dvorkin, another former member of the Strategic Missile Forces, I was escorted out of the room almost as soon as I brought up the topic.
So why didn't the US report the Perimeter? Those savvy on the subject have long noted the Soviet military's extreme penchant for secrecy, but that probably doesn't fully explain the silence.
It may be due in part to fears that the US will be trying to figure out how to disable the system. But the main reason is much deeper. According to Yarynich, the perimeter was never intended only as a traditional doomsday machine. The USSR understood the rules of the game and went one step further than Kubrick, Szilard and all the rest: they built a system to keep themselves.
By ensuring that Moscow could retaliate, Perimeter was effectively designed to keep Soviet military and civilian leaders from making a hasty, hasty, and premature decision to launch. That is, give time to “cool hot heads. No matter what happened, there will still be room for revenge. The attackers will be punished."
"Perimeter" solved this problem. If the Soviet radar received an alarming but ambiguous signal, the leaders could turn on the Perimeter and wait. If the alarm was false, the "Perimeter" turned off.
“That's why we have a system,” Yarynich believes. — To avoid a tragic mistake.
Since Yarynich proudly describes Perimeter, I ask him a question: What to do if the system fails? What to do if something goes wrong? A computer virus, an earthquake, a deliberate act to convince the system that a war has begun?
Yarinich sips beer and dispels my doubts. Even given the unthinkable series of accidents, there will be at least one human hand to keep the Perimeter from destroying the world. Prior to 1985, he said, the Soviets had developed several automatic systems that could launch a counterattack without human intervention at all. But all these devices were rejected by the high command.
Yes, a person could decide, in the end, and not press the button. But this man was a soldier isolated in an underground bunker. And all around is evidence that the enemy has just destroyed his homeland and everyone he knows. The sensors went off, the timers are ticking. This is an instruction, and soldiers are trained to follow instructions. Although…
“I can’t say if I personally would have pressed the button,” Yarynych himself admits.
Of course, it's hardly a button, really. Now it could be some kind of key or other safety switch. He's not entirely sure. After all, he says, Dead Hand is constantly being updated.
Nicholas Thompson
Sourced from wired.com
And in order to finish off the most impenetrable reader to the end, a legendary song in the subject, from a legendary group. Enjoy and think...
Take a look at these amazing photos and then go ahead and try to do the same as this guy. Will you be able to...
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
Flip through the book
- About the book
- about the author
- Reviews
The long-awaited book of the man who first revealed the secrets of the Pentagon.
Edward Snowden
Deep understanding of the essence of war.
Oliver Stone
American director, screenwriter and producer
In the last thirty years since the (first) Cold War, the perception of nuclear weapons has become somewhat folklore. The feeling of a direct and obvious threat to humanity was replaced at the end of the 20th century by a rather carefree attitude towards the nuclear issue as a source of historical anecdotes and a kind of anachronism. Daniel Ellsberg does not intimidate the reader, as the catchy title of the book suggests, he does a much more important thing. He recalls that the nuclear sphere is very serious and incredibly important, no matter what happens in global politics and no matter what leaders appear on the world horizon.
Fedor Lukyanov
Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, Chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy
Quote
The unleashed energy of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and this is leading us to an unprecedented catastrophe.Albert Einstein
What is this book about
Daniel Ellsberg talks about the danger and recklessness of the US nuclear policy for more than 70 years. For the first time, he reveals the details of the American nuclear program of the 1960s, which involved a preemptive strike against the USSR. You will learn all about the chaos in the US military command environment: from the situation at the most remote air bases in the Pacific region, where the right to decide on the use of nuclear weapons is transferred from one level of command to another, to the secret plans for an all-out nuclear war that would lead to the destruction of all mankind.Why the book is worth reading
- Nothing in human history could be more insane and immoral than the nuclear threat. The book is a story about how this catastrophic situation arose and why it has persisted for more than half a century.
- Never before had a direct participant in the events written so frankly about the nuclear strategy of the Eisenhower and Kennedy era.
- The author uses top secret documents, access to which he received during the development of the nuclear war plan.
- Unfortunately, little has changed since those times, despite all attempts to agree on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, the doomsday machine still threatens to destroy the world.
Who is author
Daniel Ellsberg - the legendary whistleblower who published the "Pentagon Papers" in 1971, after which Henry Kissinger called him "the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs." In 1961, Ellsberg was a consultant to the US Department of Defense and the White House and developed plans for nuclear war. In the course of this work, he realized that in the event of an American attack on the Soviet Union, more than half a billion people would have died. From that day on, Ellsberg's main goal was to prevent the implementation of such plans. He writes about the dangers of the nuclear age and the need to raise public awareness of existing threats.
Video presentation of the book
The legendary whistleblower who published the "Pentagon Papers" in 1971, after which Henry Kissinger called him "the most dangerous man in America who must be stopped at all costs." In 1961, Ellsberg was a consultant to the US Department of Defense and the White House and developed plans for nuclear war. In the course of this work, he realized that in the event of an American attack on the Soviet Union, more than half a billion people would have died. From that day on, Ellsberg's main goal was to prevent the implementation of such plans. He writes about the dangers of the nuclear age and the need to raise public awareness of existing threats.