Dead Hand: Still Shaking Things Up After All These Years?

November 30, 2011, 2:45pm

To cut right to the awful chase: All batshit Biblical between-the-lines reading aside, we’re all end-timers, or doomers, or whatever. Sorry to grim up this brilliant Wednesday for you. But the truth is that we can’t shake this whole nukes problem, long the hushed Fertile Crescent of odd rumor and speculation and (admit it) brilliant technological innovation, precisely because we get some sick satisfaction by fantasizing about the flash and the cloud and the approaching rumble. What, oh what will a modern fallout look like?

And recent stirrings may only be bringing entirely new meanings to “nuclear winter.” The U.S., violating terms of the Chemical Weapons Convention (this accord requires signatory-states, including America, to destroy their weapons of mass destruction by the end of April 2012), announced on Thanksgiving that it will hoard its more than 5,000 existing nuclear warheads for another decade. Tom Donilon, White House national security adviser, recently argued that Iran’s nukes program “is undeniable.” Just today, North Korea said it is “making rapid progress” in uranium enrichment.

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Absent from much of these despicable, terrible developments, though, are the Russians, once formidable players – indeed the formidable player – in the global doomsday game. At one time, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Russia had a stockpile of roughly 40,000 warheads. And save for “apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks,” as Wired puts it, Joe and Jane Public probably have little idea that even amid all the noise, fear and hypocritical finger pointing coming out of the U.S and North Korea and Iran, to this day Russia retains the largest nuclear arsenal, some 10,000 warheads.

Being a layperson who doesn’t spend his time über-hawkishly writing science-fiction (though I’ll be the first to admit to occasional paranoia), I’ll even go so far as to hazard the guess that there are even smaller odds that my fellow commoners have really any idea about one particularly lifeless vestige of Cold War era fail-deadly deterrence: Russia’s Dead Hand.

It’s what we think of as the proverbial Doomsday Device. The goal then – it’s believed Dead Hand was implemented just prior to Russia’s arsenal peak in the late 1980’s – was to be able to land the cruelest of cruel comebacks, a final, strategic-strike punchline capable of being dropped even after, say, both the Kremlin and Moscow’s top brass were obliterated by, oh I don’t know, an American bomb. Dead Hand, William Broad once wrote, “takes this defensive trend to its logical, if chilling, conclusion.”

Some experts suspect that the system was built out in the subterranean bunkers to the south of Moscow. Backup locales would’ve ensured the system was operational in times of crisis, when leading military officials would’ve fired off a coded command to the bunkers. Dead Hand would then awaken, automatically pulling the trigger on Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Or, if ground-level sensors strewn about the region detected seismic rumblings – and if this happened in the unfortunate event that communication lines to military commanders had been severed – Dead Hand would’ve pulsed low-frequency signals to specialized rockets through underground antennae. Screaming across the skies “over missile fields and other military sites,” Broad explains, these rockets would then broadcast attack commands to other rockets and bombers. Through radio relays, seafaring submarines would likewise get the strike orders.

Just how Dead Hand would’ve actually been shook, so to speak, is unclear. Could some sort of key-in mechanism or secured switch have ended it all? Or would it have been as easy as pressing one giant red button? The world may never know.

But no matter – what’s troubling is that Dead Hand may still exist. Valery Yarynich, a former Soviet colonel, helped develop the device, and told Wired in 2009 that he’s unsure how the thing is triggered because it’s “continuously being upgraded.”

So, here’s the obligatory Strangelove closer: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.