WIRED magazine, on the Soviet Doomsday machine that, in all probability, has not yet been retired. From a the man who helped build it, now in the US:

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The article puts this in perspective with Reagan’s Star Wars programme, and the US’s equivalent of Dead Hand. Also interesting is the graph comparing the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals over the decades:

Remember that John F Kennedy made the supposed “missile gap” – the claim that the Soviets had widened their lead in arsenal size during the Eisenhower administration – an important part of his 1960 election campaign, stealing Vice President Nixon’s thunder. Kennedy was told shortly after taking office in January 1961 that there really was a missile gap – overwhelmingly in America’s favour, as is clear from the graph.