blog.wired.com — The Soviet doomsday device - a giant cobalt bomb rigged to explode were Russia ever nuked, rendering the earth's surface uninhabitable - gained fictional fame in Dr. Strangelove. However, P.D. Smith's Doomsday Men, available in the UK and due for stateside publication in December, tells the story of the real Doomsday device - and it's still armed.
Sep 13, 2007 View in Crawl 4
cbuddha42Sep 15, 2007
Amazingly enough it can be turned off. That's right kids; it's not active all the time. The closest we have ever been to Russia blowing us all the f**k up was thanks to their standing LOW orders, not this system.Not that the system is a good idea, basically if it loses contact with all its monitoring nodes it shoots a bunch of missiles. It would take a blackout slightly larger than the NY one a few years ago and the failure of emergency power or communication systems in order to accidentally trigger this event. If this did happen and the perimeter system was active at the time, then we would probably all die. However, the idea of this system is actually to reduce Russian relaiance on LOW. Basically the idea is if Russia thinks they are about to be nuked they can activate this system there by reducing their need to retaliate before they are hit and all die (it will continue to function and shoot missiles even after they all die). However, Russian LOW time is still 15 minutes which basically means decision in 10, and the furthest into that we've been in 8 minutes in 1995 (2 minutes from Yeltsin being asked to push the button in his cheget).Oh, this system used to be named dead hand, but it was banned by a treaty, so the Russians renamed it Perimeter.
mrurcSep 15, 2007
WOW. I thought other people in this thread were clueless but you just won the prize. Jobs locks down the new iPods? Try Apple locks down the iPhone. Saying that Jobs locked it down is like saying that Steve Balmer patched our systems contrary to our settings. In your reply you both accuse complainers of not using Microsoft products and living and dying by the company they choose for an mp3 player. Well, if they don't use Windows and they only use Apples for the mp3 players, what operating system do you think it is that they are using? One of the ones that doesn't support iTunes, which is the software for their mp3 players that they live or die by? You make no sense at all AND you are posting in the wrong thread.
daskSep 16, 2007
This is no game. Would you like to see projected kill ratios?
merelyjimSep 16, 2007
Does anyone else see another Tom Clancy "Jack Ryan" novel resulting from this?
calebhSep 16, 2007
You call controlling the fate of humanity "simple"
heystoopidSep 25, 2007
Interesting concept , but then again , in the US , there exists a large number of open air nuclear waste repositories sites , like for example the 586 square mile facility at a place called Hanford in Washington State , and a small 5 megaton close proximity atmospheric blast would recreate the exact same effect as the old Soviet Doomsday weapon !As they say , tit for tat , so it probably explains why the US maintained so many open air nuclear waste facilities for that very reason !