How do you stop a nuclear armed opponent with better, more accurate weapons from launching a first strike that would decapitate the command structure of your country before you had a chance to launch your weapons in retaliation.
This was the question that the leaders of the Soviet Union faced during the Cold War, when the US was actively thinking about a first strike. Well, one way is to promise a full retaliatory strike from the dead, even if the leadership and communication of the country are destroyed.
This almost mythical system was known as Perimeter to the Soviets and eventually, Dead hand to the West. All though the US didn’t directly know about it at the time, they suspected that the Soviets had some form of automated system and this did have an effect on how the US wargamed scenarios on how a possible 1st strike might pan out and may well have stopped a nuclear attack in the 1980s.
Although it wasn’t seen directly by the US during the cold war, after the fall of the Soviet Union it was confirmed that such a system did exist, and in some form still exists today.
So what was this system and how did it come about.
Well, this was a tale of technological advance and leadership that was scared of the responsibility starting an all-out nuclear war.
During the 50s and 60s Soviet Union and the United states we’re in an arms race, each one trying to create bigger more powerful nuclear weapons with tit for tat moves that would eventually lead, in Nov 1961 to the creation of the largest ever nuclear weapon, the Tsar bomba, a 50 megaton Device, but even the Soviets knew it was not practical weapon but a propaganda tool to scare the West and in particular the United states.
The Soviets were well aware that they had created some the largest bombs, but the accuracy of their missiles that carried them was not up to the same standard as the US.
This was an extremely scary time as the weapons had become more and more powerful and the mind of the public their main target were cities, one bomb could wipe out a large city with millions of people in it. With soft targets like that, a multi megaton bomb detonating even near a city would still have devastating results.
This is what the Soviets relied upon, the fear of these weapons being unleashed and ending civilisation as we know it. It didn’t matter if their rockets weren’t that accurate, if you have a 10 megaton device you can be off target by a several Km and a city would still be destroyed.
But for 1st strikes against hardened command and control targets hidden deep within mountains and hardened silos, even multi megaton devices might not achieve their purpose if they could not get very close to the target.
This is what worried the Soviets, if one side could knock out the others command and control with highly accurate targeting, they might be able to deal a killer blow to the other.
Then what the soviets feared the most happened as the US deployed Pershing missiles into Europe in the mid 1960s. By the early 1980s, submarine launched ballistic missiles like the Trident D5 were also as accurate as any land based missiles and could be launched off the coast of the Soviet Union. The Pershing II which was a highly mobile system and based in West Germany and had a range of about 1770 km or 1100 miles, enough to reach the western Soviet Union and maybe just Moscow. This and the SLBM’s fuelled a fear that the US could launch a 1st strike before the soviet command could get the orders out to launch its own retaliation.
Although the Soviets gave the impression that they would be willing to start a nuclear war if it came to that, in reality the leadership was not willing to plunge the world into a nuclear war on whim and the responsibility of this weighed very heavily on the shoulders of the ageing Soviet leadership.
They were also aware that mistakes could be made and again that responsibility with something that many of the leaders in private didn’t want to have as something hanging around their necks, even if in public that gave the opposite impression.
In 1959 at the Geneva Conference of Foreign Ministers on the Berlin Crisis, Khrushchev said, “Our rockets will fire automatically”. What he was alluding to was not possible at the time and was said to make the US feel as if the soviets had superior rockets coming not long after the launch of Sputnik, but it also showed the underlaying willingness of the soviets to have an automatic system of retaliation during the cold war.
This was the time of the R-7 , the NATO name SS-6 SAPWOOD, the first Soviet ICBM which that was a modified version of the rocket that launched Sputnik. However, the soviet command and control relied on paper dockets that were distributed to the area command and to be opened only in a crisis, so the idea of a quick reacting missile system grew in the minds of the leaders.
At the same time early anti-ballistic missile systems or ABM’s of the 1960s were starting to prove just how difficult a task shooting down incoming warheads would be, something which today is only possible over small area, but to cover the Soviet union it was simply impossible.
If incoming missiles couldn’t shot down and with the US missiles having greater accuracy they needed something that would be an ace card that they could pull out in an emergency.
Whilst talks over the ABM treaty between the US and soviets were on going in the mid 1970s, the soviet command and control system, Signal, was being upgraded to react quicker and would feature a remote controlled button that could be pushed to lunch and which came online in the mid 1970s and would be the basis of a new system.
At the that time, both the Soviets and United States operated similar systems which would detect an incoming attack and then before any enemy missiles landed, they would launch their own retaliation. This was the doctrine of MAD or mutually assured destruction, if one side attacked the other, the other would retaliate and neither side would survive.
The problem with this was that mistakes could be made, and there have been numerous instances on both sides where a perceived attack turned out to be faulty data or even equipment and it was only through a human overseeing the operation that an accidental all out nuclear war was avoided.
So, something that would cut out the possibility of mistakes was required but and also give the ultimate deterrence by preventing that 1st strike would be ideal in the eyes of the Soviets.
The Perimeter or Dead Hand system was designed to try and avoid these errors. Well actually Perimeter or Dead Hand were two separate systems but are often seen in the west as one. Perimeter was the method by which launch commands would the sent to the missiles and Dead Hand was the method by which they would determine that they were under attack. There combined effect was believed to have come online in 1985, so lets see what each part did.
Firstly dead hand, this was to be the backstop when all else failed, a way to launch a retaliatory strike even if the command and control had been knocked out.
This used a web of sensors both on the ground and in space to pick up, radioactivity, seismic, light and over pressure information suggesting that a nuclear attack on the Soviet soil had taken place but also to filter out false alarms.
For example the very bright flash of a nuclear detonation is unique in that it’s actually a double flash, a brief initial flash of light of the detonation followed by a second, slightly longer flash as the fireball cools. If it were only a very bright single flash, like maybe a meteorite burning up in the atmosphere, it could therefore be assumed that it might not be nuclear in origin.
This is where other sensor readings would come in, so no one piece of data could trigger the system. Things like overpressure from the blast wave, and seismic activity if it were a ground burst and radioactivity, not just in the fallout but in the burst of gamma, x-rays and neutrons and the EMP or electromagnetic pulse. When all of these are picked from various locations you can be sure that you are under attack and all without any humans having to be there to witness it.
These sensors were not computerised, they were dedicated analogue systems, each one simple in design but when the results from hundreds of them across the country are analysed you can very quickly determine if there has been an attack.
But this was only one part of Dead Hand. The other was to see if there was still someone in control.
During the cold war U.S. nuclear war planning against the Soviet Union was governed by counterforce-first logic, not immediate city destruction. The objective was to prevent or limit a Soviet nuclear response, not to annihilate population centres on day one, once that had happened it would be an all out war. As a result, the first targets would have been military, command, and nuclear infrastructure.
Places like Kremlin leadership bunkers, alternate command sites deep underground and known and suspected relocation sites. Then early-warning radars, long-range communications hubs and satellite ground stations. This was to paralyze Soviet ability to detect attacks, issue orders and co-ordinate retaliation. Finally, the ICBM Fields, mostly concentrated in Kazakhstan, Siberia, the western USSR, along with strategic bomber bases and ballistic missile submarine bases.
If the sensors were saying there had been and attack but the commanders were still in contact, they would await orders, but if there was no contact within a reasonable amount of time, with any of the high command then this would be the final piece of the puzzle, and the next stage would be put in to action and Perimeter would be launched.
The headquarters of Dead Hand were believed to have been under the Ural mountains. From there the signal out go out to hidden launch areas, these wouldn’t launch nuclear missiles but a small number specialised missiles which carried powerful radio transmitters, these would send launch codes to all the available missile forces.
These signals couldn’t actually press the fire button, humans did the final part but order they gave effectively came from the high command and didn’t need to be checked, just acted upon.
Because this was done by machine system on a pre-programmed set of rules it was also deemed to have removed the responsibility of making the decision of pressing the button from the Soviet leadership, even though they might already be dead.
It was basically an if-then system that looked at the data and determined that if a certain set of circumstances had happened, then the missiles would launch, they effectively handed over responsibility to a machine, like a giant mushroom cloud shaped middle finger to the US from beyond the grave.
Leonid Brezhnev, the second longest leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin was a control freak and consolidated many of the state powers to himself but he was scared of having to decide the fate of the world and terrified by the responsibility in declaring a retaliatory strike without being sure it was needed.
As time went by and more and more of the elderly Soviet leadership came and went, the time between 1 leader dying and another one being elected was seen as a weak point that could be exploited, but having an automated system would help negate these concerns.
To the Soviets this was seen as the ultimate deterrent against the Americans
But how could it be a deterrent if the other side didn’t know about it. Well during the 1980s, US intelligence did not fully understand Deah Hands architecture, but it suspected something like it existed. It was only in the 1990s when the USSR collapsed that the truth about Dead Hand came out.
What the US did perceive was that the Soviet Union assumed a high probability of a decapitation strike and that they feared surprise attack more than escalation and that systems to remove hesitation from retaliation did probably exist.
Even without direct evidence the US view of Soviet doctrine was that it was highly centralized, rigid, and prepared to automate extreme responses and that such a system would be designed by people who believed annihilation was likely, but not desirable.
This had an effect on US deterrence calculations and that even if leadership were destroyed, it might not stop retaliation and decapitation strategies lost credibility undermining the idea that faster missiles or surprise alone could win, which indirectly strengthened Mutually Assured Destruction stability.
Although they suspected an automated system was put in place by the Soviets, the US never made a similar system itself because they wanted humans in control at all times and didn’t have the same pessimistic outlook that tolerated an automated response.
Now although I’ve just said that it was an automatic system it wasn’t completely automatic it had to be turned on or enabled. Quite when this was done isn’t quite sure but it’s been assumed that it would be only turned on during a time of crisis but from what we can gather now from about 2009 the system has been left on serve the current leadership of the Russian Federation.
But this also has ramifications for today and AI in the command and control loop and autonomous escalation risks and is frequently cited as “The historical example of why you never want let machines decide when the world ends.”
It’s completely risk-free, so check it out today!
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