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More information can be found in the book "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy" by David E. Hoffman. It really i

More information can be found in the book "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy" by David E. Hoffman. It really is a Dr. Strangelove inspired "Doomsday Device".

jacquesm 5y ago
The way I understand it it needs to be activated first, and that requires a human.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  I also think there is a second human stage after the system has been activated. From my understanding after Dead Hand is armed with the access codes it goes into a monitoring state. Until all conditions are met nothing happens but upon losing its links to all nuclear commands -and- it detects that a nuclear strike has landed on Soviet soil only then does it provide nuclear arming codes to the staff of the Dead Hand control bunker. These poor souls then make the decision to end humanity or not by launching the control missiles which will activate all automated nuclear weapons, transmit authorizations to bombers and submarines etc - which too will have humans that need to make the call if they want to take part in the apocalypse. Though AFAICT Russia still has enough land based ICBMs to level every major city on earth and all of those are probably 100% automated so I don't think the poor airmen/seamen will have to worry too much about their conscience no matter which choice they make.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    There has been some speculation about how many of these will still work due to periodic remanufacturing requirements, that would be interesting to get some hard data on. Probably a very closely guarded state secret.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Though AFAICT Russia still has enough land based ICBMs to level every major city on earth... I learned the other day that there are two main strategies for targeting nuclear weapons, counter-force (nuking military targets) vs counter-value (nuking cities). The former requires a lot more warheads for an effective deterrent, and the large stockpile of nukes in the US and Russia implies that they're doing a lot of counter-force targeting (though I suppose that doesn't mean they won't also attack counter-value targets as well). IIRC, according to this an exclusive counter-force nuclear attack against Russia would use far more warheads, but kill less people than an exclusive counter-value attack (~10 million vs 50 million deaths). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/057004008 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/057004008
    - jpgvm 5y ago
      That is really interesting. For me the counter-value strategy seems like a more effective deterrent though from a MAD/counter-attack perspective. It's meant to be a terrifying outcome and maximally terrifying is the best possible configuration to prevent nuclear war. There is only ~500 cities in the world with over 1mil population, Russia has over 5k operational nukes. That is ~10 nukes for every large city on Earth. If they were only interested in nuking the US that is still ~100 nukes per US state.
pvg 5y ago
The book also covers a broad range of late Cold War events and weapons programs - it's well worth the read, just don't expect it to be a mirror image of something like Eric Schlosser's Command & Control (which is also a great read but with a much narrower focus).
saboot 5y ago
I haven't read this book, but I did recently read Eric Kaplan's "The Bomb", he goes into detail the decision processes of the US nuclear response and how much it changed (or didn't!) throughout all of the presidents
- pvg 5y ago
  Small nitpick, the name of the author is Fred Kaplan.
yabones 5y ago
The sections of that book about Biopreparat were deeply unsettling. Knowing the lengths they went to keeping the program a secret, it wouldn't shock me if they did continue to develop or conduct secret research on biological weapons after 1995. With nuclear weapons you want everybody to know you have them, but bio weapons by nature are secretive. It's the kind of cruel and horrifying weapon that even your own people can't know about.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Russia is even now accusing the US of hosting Biolabs in Ukraine to make weapons specifically targeted at Slavic peoples. I'm sure someone in the world is doing it, even if Russia is just making stuff up here.

jacquesm 5y ago

The way I understand it it needs to be activated first, and that requires a human.

jpgvm 5y ago
I also think there is a second human stage after the system has been activated. From my understanding after Dead Hand is armed with the access codes it goes into a monitoring state. Until all conditions are met nothing happens but upon losing its links to all nuclear commands -and- it detects that a nuclear strike has landed on Soviet soil only then does it provide nuclear arming codes to the staff of the Dead Hand control bunker. These poor souls then make the decision to end humanity or not by launching the control missiles which will activate all automated nuclear weapons, transmit authorizations to bombers and submarines etc - which too will have humans that need to make the call if they want to take part in the apocalypse. Though AFAICT Russia still has enough land based ICBMs to level every major city on earth and all of those are probably 100% automated so I don't think the poor airmen/seamen will have to worry too much about their conscience no matter which choice they make.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  There has been some speculation about how many of these will still work due to periodic remanufacturing requirements, that would be interesting to get some hard data on. Probably a very closely guarded state secret.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Though AFAICT Russia still has enough land based ICBMs to level every major city on earth... I learned the other day that there are two main strategies for targeting nuclear weapons, counter-force (nuking military targets) vs counter-value (nuking cities). The former requires a lot more warheads for an effective deterrent, and the large stockpile of nukes in the US and Russia implies that they're doing a lot of counter-force targeting (though I suppose that doesn't mean they won't also attack counter-value targets as well). IIRC, according to this an exclusive counter-force nuclear attack against Russia would use far more warheads, but kill less people than an exclusive counter-value attack (~10 million vs 50 million deaths). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/057004008 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/057004008
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    That is really interesting. For me the counter-value strategy seems like a more effective deterrent though from a MAD/counter-attack perspective. It's meant to be a terrifying outcome and maximally terrifying is the best possible configuration to prevent nuclear war. There is only ~500 cities in the world with over 1mil population, Russia has over 5k operational nukes. That is ~10 nukes for every large city on Earth. If they were only interested in nuking the US that is still ~100 nukes per US state.

pvg 5y ago

The book also covers a broad range of late Cold War events and weapons programs - it's well worth the read, just don't expect it to be a mirror image of something like Eric Schlosser's Command & Control (which is also a great read but with a much narrower focus).

saboot 5y ago

I haven't read this book, but I did recently read Eric Kaplan's "The Bomb", he goes into detail the decision processes of the US nuclear response and how much it changed (or didn't!) throughout all of the presidents

pvg 5y ago
Small nitpick, the name of the author is Fred Kaplan.

yabones 5y ago

The sections of that book about Biopreparat were deeply unsettling. Knowing the lengths they went to keeping the program a secret, it wouldn't shock me if they did continue to develop or conduct secret research on biological weapons after 1995. With nuclear weapons you want everybody to know you have them, but bio weapons by nature are secretive. It's the kind of cruel and horrifying weapon that even your own people can't know about.

thatguy0900 5y ago
Russia is even now accusing the US of hosting Biolabs in Ukraine to make weapons specifically targeted at Slavic peoples. I'm sure someone in the world is doing it, even if Russia is just making stuff up here.