On 13 Novem­ber 1984, a Sovi­et mis­sile was launched from Kapustin Yar, east of Stal­in­grad. About forty min­utes lat­er an R‑36M inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile blast­ed off from an under­ground silo in Kaza­khstan. Known to West­ern intel­li­gence experts as the SS-18 Satan mis­sile, it was capa­ble of car­ry­ing either a sin­gle 24-mega­ton war­head or eight inde­pen­dent­ly tar­get­ed 600-kilo­ton war­heads. The bomb that killed some 200,000 peo­ple at Hiroshi­ma was just 12 kilo­tons.

The launch was mon­i­tored by the West’s spy satel­lites. But it was an unex­cep­tion­al moment in the his­to­ry of the arms race and soon for­got­ten. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached, and the ice of the cold war began to thaw, did mil­i­tary ana­lysts real­ize the sig­nif­i­cance of these oth­er­wise unex­cep­tion­al rock­et launch­es. They were the first oper­a­tional test of what the West­ern press lat­er described as ‘Russia’s dooms­day machine’.

In my book Dooms­day Men, I showed how pop­u­lar cul­ture played a vital role in inspir­ing the dream of the super­weapon, a dream that in the nuclear age turned into the night­mare of mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion, or MAD.

More than any oth­er weapon, it was Leo Szilard’s chill­ing notion of the cobalt bomb (first described on Amer­i­can radio in 1950) that came to sym­bol­ize the threat of glob­al nuclear destruc­tion. The C‑bomb con­sist­ed of one or more mas­sive hydro­gen bombs jack­et­ed with cobalt. It was the ulti­mate weapon, a dooms­day device which could spread radioac­tive fall­out across the entire plan­et.

As through­out the his­to­ry of super­weapons, fic­tion and film played a key role in explor­ing the hor­rif­ic impli­ca­tions of the C‑bomb and how it could be used to cre­ate a dooms­day machine, most famous­ly in Peter George’s best-sell­ing thriller Red Alert (1958) and Stan­ley Kubrick’s cold-war clas­sic (based on George’s nov­el) Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb (1964).

As Ambas­sador DeSades­ki explains in Dr Strangelove: ‘If you take, say, fifty H‑bombs in the hun­dred mega­ton range and jack­et them with cobalt tho­ri­um G, when they are explod­ed they will pro­duce a dooms­day shroud. A lethal cloud of radioac­tiv­i­ty which will encir­cle the earth for nine­ty-three years!’

Twen­ty years after Kubrick’s film depict­ed the world being destroyed by a Sovi­et dooms­day machine, the real one became oper­a­tional. Nick­named by its com­man­ders ‘The Dead Hand’, it was a sophis­ti­cat­ed sys­tem of sen­sors, com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works and com­mand bunkers, rein­forced to with­stand nuclear strikes. At its heart was a com­put­er. As soon as the Sovi­et lead­er­ship detect­ed pos­si­ble incom­ing mis­siles, it acti­vat­ed the sys­tem, known by its code name ‘Perimetr’. Part of the secret codes need­ed to launch a Sovi­et nuclear strike were released and the com­put­er­ized process set in motion. Then, like a spi­der at the cen­tre of its web, the com­put­er would watch and wait for evi­dence of an attack.

As I said in my book, the way it worked was strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to the dooms­day machine described by Dr Strangelove. He explained that the com­put­er was ‘linked to a vast inter­lock­ing net­work of data-input sen­sors which are sta­tioned through­out the coun­try and orbit­ed in satel­lites. These sen­sors mon­i­tor heat, ground shock, sound, atmos­pher­ic pres­sure and radioac­tiv­i­ty.’

Much about the Dead Hand sys­tem is still shroud­ed in secre­cy. Russ­ian arms expert Bruce Blair revealed the first details in 1993. Recent­ly declas­si­fied inter­views with for­mer Sovi­et offi­cials have cast fresh light on the sys­tem. They show that there were doubts about its reli­a­bil­i­ty. Some even ques­tioned whether it was ever ful­ly deployed. How­ev­er, these inter­views also reveal the shock­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty that the Dead Hand sys­tem may have been ful­ly auto­mat­ic.

Pre­vi­ous­ly it was thought that once the com­put­er detect­ed signs of an attack, it required human approval before any counter attack could be launched. A Sovi­et offi­cer buried deep under­ground in a com­mand post would have had the unen­vi­able task of autho­ris­ing the Dead Hand to com­plete its lethal task. But these inter­views raise the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the Dead Hand had elim­i­nat­ed the need for any human con­trol. It may be that the Dead Hand could launch the entire Sovi­et nuclear arse­nal as soon as its sen­sors indi­cat­ed that an attack had occurred. That idea is tru­ly ter­ri­fy­ing.

A machine would be respon­si­ble for unleash­ing nuclear weapons with a total destruc­tive pow­er as much as 50,000 times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshi­ma. Even with­out Szi­lard’s C‑bomb, who knows what would be left alive after such a nuclear holo­caust.

Intrigu­ing­ly, Nicholas Thomp­son, writ­ing in Wired today, argues that Perimetr was actu­al­ly designed ‘to keep an overea­ger Sovi­et mil­i­tary or civil­ian leader from launch­ing pre­ma­ture­ly dur­ing a cri­sis’. In oth­er words, it was an insur­ance pol­i­cy meant to reas­sure the Kremlin’s hawks that their coun­try could hit back, even after a sneak attack by sub­ma­rine launched mis­siles, which would have giv­en the Sovi­et lead­er­ship bare­ly thir­teen min­utes advance warn­ing of a dev­as­tat­ing attack.

As far as any­one knows, the Dead Hand remains oper­a­tional. What is tru­ly wor­ry­ing, even today, is the secre­cy that con­tin­ues to sur­round the whole sub­ject. Thomp­son has found that nei­ther George Schultz nor for­mer CIA direc­tor James Woolsey had heard of the Dead Hand sys­tem. For­mer Sovi­et era offi­cials will still not dis­cuss it. One who dared to talk died in mys­te­ri­ous circumstances. Such secre­cy is, as Dr Strangelove realised, disastrous: ‘Yes, but the…whole point of the dooms­day machine…is lost…if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?’

The dooms­day machine is sup­posed to be the ulti­mate deter­rent. But if no one knows that the deter­rent exists… Well, you’ve all seen the final scenes of Dr Strangelove.