"The nuclear doomsday machine." It's a Cold War term that has long seemed obsolete.
And even back then, the "doomsday machine" was regarded as a scary conjectural fiction. Not impossible to create—the physics and mechanics of it were first spelled out by U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard—but never actually created, having a real existence only in such apocalyptic nightmares as Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system's sensors detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or (as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.
An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.
Instead, something was reactivated in Russia last week. I'm referring to the ominous announcement—given insufficient attention by most U.S. media (the Economist made it the opening of a lead editorial on Putin's Russia)—by Vladimir Putin that Russia has resumed regular "strategic flights" of nuclear bombers. (They may or may not be carrying nuclear bombs, but you can practically hear Putin's smirking tone as he says, "Our [nuclear bomber] pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.")
These twin developments raise a troubling question: What are the United States' and Russia's current nuclear policies with regard to how and when they will respond to a perceived nuclear attack? In most accounts, once the president or Russian premier receives radar warning of an attack, they have less than 15 minutes to decide whether the warning is valid. The pressure is on to "use it or lose it"—launch our missiles before they can be destroyed in their silos. Pressure that makes the wrong decision more likely. Pressure that makes accidental nuclear war a real possibility.
Once you start to poke into this matter, you discover a disturbing level of uncertainty, which leads me to believe we should be demanding that the United States and Russia define and defend their nuclear postures. Bush and Putin should be compelled to tell us just what "failsafe" provisions are installed on their respective nuclear bombers, missiles, and submarines—what the current provisions against warning malfunctions are and what kinds of controls there are over the ability of lone madman nuclear bombers to bring on the unhappy end of history.
As for the former Soviet Union, the possible existence of a version of a doomsday machine is both relevant and disturbing.
In the Strangelove film, the Soviet ambassador tells the president and generals in the U.S. war room that the device was designed to deter a surprise attack, the kind of attack that might otherwise prevent retaliation by "decapitating" the Soviet command structure. The automated system would insure massive world-destroying retaliation even if the entire Soviet leadership were wiped out—or had second thoughts. As a result, some referred to it as the "dead hand" doomsday device.
It is Dr. Strangelove himself, the madman U.S. nuclear strategist played by Peter Sellers, who detects the flaw in this plan. After being apprised of the system's existence by the Soviet ambassador, and the likelihood of its being triggered by a U.S. bomber on an unauthorized mission to nuke its Soviet target, Dr. Strangelove exclaims:
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?
In other words, a doomsday machine kept secret is no good for deterrence, only for retaliation by extinction.
Did the Soviets actually design a variation on a doomsday device and not tell us about it? And could an accidental or terrorist nuclear attack on Putin's Russia (by Chechens, for instance) trigger an antiquated automated dead-hand system and launch missiles capable of killing tens, maybe hundreds, of millions at unknown targets that might include the United States?
Up until Aug. 10 of this year, I would have thought these questions were best consigned to the realm of apocalyptic film fantasy. But on that day I came upon a startling essay in the London Times Literary Supplement. It was a review (titled "Deadly Devices") of a book recently published in the United Kingdom: Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by nuclear-age historian P.D. Smith of University College London. (It will be out in the United States in December.)
The TLS reviewer, Christopher Coker (who is on the faculty of the London School of Economics), asserted that the book demonstrates that "only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and ... the Cold War began to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the [doomsday] device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in 13 minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communication network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr. Strangelove. Its code name was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place."
Wait a minute. Still in place?! How is this possible?
In the endnotes of Smith's book (which turns out to be an illuminating portrait of the Doomsday weapon concept and its cultural implications), I found a reference to a further description of the Perimetr system in a 2003 Washington Post op-ed by Bruce G. Blair, the former Minuteman ICBM launch control officer who first revealed the existence of the program. (When he wrote the op-ed, he was a Brookings fellow; he is now head of the World Security Institute in Washington, a liberal think tank.)
The op-ed offers a far more detailed and chilling picture of Perimetr than the brief mention devoted to it in the book and review:
Die-hard [U.S.] nuclear war planners actually have their eyes on targets in Russia and China, including missile silos and leadership bunkers. For these planners, the Cold War never ended. Their top two candidates [i.e., targets] in Russia are located inside the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains in the central and southern Urals.
Both were huge construction projects begun in the late 1970s, when U.S. nuclear firepower took special aim at the Communist Party's leadership complex. Fearing a decapitating strike, the Soviets sent tens of thousands of workers to these remote sites, where U.S. spy satellites spotted them still toiling away in the late 1990s.
Blair sources his information on these command bunkers to "diagrams and notes given to me in the late 1990s by SAC [Strategic Air Command] senior officers," men in charge of targeting our missile and bomber forces.
From them, he paints a Strangelovian picture:
The Yamantau command center is inside a rock quartz mountain, about 3,000 feet straight down from the summit. It is a wartime relocation facility for the top Russian political leadership. It is more a shelter than a command post, because the facility's communications links are relatively fragile. As it turned out, the quartz interferes with radio signals broadcast from inside the mountain.
A quartz nuclear-war mountain! Something phantasmal about it, like a satanic big rock candy mountain. But the quartz mountain melts in comparison with the Perimetr dead-hand system at Kosvinsky.
"Kosvinsky," Blair tells us, "is regarded by U.S. targeteers as the crown jewel of the Russian wartime nuclear command system, because it can communicate through the granite mountain to far-flung Russian strategic forces using very-low-frequency (VLF) radio signals that can burn through a nuclear war environment. The facility is the critical link to Russia's 'dead hand' communications network, designed to ensure semi-automatic retaliation to a decapitating strike."
Of course, there's a world of difference between a "semi-automatic" doomsday device and the totally automatic—beyond human control—doomsday device in Strangelove, something that Blair is careful to note. The Soviet facility does require a human hand for the final fatal push of the button. But Blair believes that the human brain behind that hand has not been programmed to suddenly turn peacenik. And the details of the device are far from reassuring.
"This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984, during the height of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of creative engineering." According to Blair, if Perimetr senses a nuclear explosion in Russian territory and then receives no communication from Moscow, it will assume the incapacity of human leadership in Moscow or elsewhere, and will then grant a single human being deep within the Kosvinsky mountains the authority and capability to launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal.
"Kosvinsky came online recently," Blair wrote in 2003, "which could be one explanation for U.S. interest in a new nuclear bunker buster."
Blair also suggested that the Bush administration's recurrent interest in funding the development of nuclear "bunker buster" bombs was at least in some respects designed to give them the capacity to destroy the dead-hand device buried deep in a Kosvinsky bunker, an argument that, if true, would suggest the dead-hand doomsday device was still thought to be operational. And perhaps you've heard something about its deactivation, but I haven't found any evidence of it.
Blair, who has written previously on the extremely rickety structure of presidential nuclear decision-making, believes that the current U.S. contingency plan is itself a "doomsday strategy":
President Bush's nuclear guidance doubtless instructs the Pentagon to plan the destruction of Yamantau and Kosvinsky, along with 2,000 other targets in Russia and hundreds more in China. But such targeting requires very high-yield weapons, typically 10 to 100 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. We are talking about a doomsday plan in which Yamantau and Kosvinsky are struck as part of an all-out nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of people.
There's some ambiguity in Blair's use of "doubtless": Does it imply that Bush's "nuclear guidance" includes only one all-out, 2,000-target response, or "merely" the capability of it? But shouldn't we know at least that in a genuinely "doubtless" way?
Blair's primary recent concern is not the prospect of a deliberate, ideological, Cold War-type nuclear war, but accidental war caused by the continued deadly presence of all-too-easily triggered Cold War arsenals. In four fascinating papers on the subject (all available online, and well worth reading), Blair describes the "launch on warning" bias built into our nuclear command structure, and foresees the possibility of a doomsday that results from our attempt to pre-empt their doomsday plan, all of which might be touched off by accident, mistake, or malfunction on either side.
Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert on the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair "requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community."
Blair's troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.
It was Blair who pointed out, in congressional testimony, another continuing problem with nuclear launch posture, this one involving the much-ballyhooed "de-targeting"—a process by which the United States and the former Soviet Union purportedly reduced the risk of accidental nuclear war by insuring that their missiles were—after the fall of the Soviet Union—not still targeted at each other. Blair told Congress that, especially on the Russian side, detargeting was only "cosmetic and symbolic," and easily reversible, implemented in name only.
What drove Blair? I was particularly fascinated by one of Blair's other papers, his more personal "Nuclear Recollections," which might have been called "Memories of a Minuteman Missile Crewman," and describes his period of service in a missile silo at the Malmstrom, Mont., Air Force Base, hundreds of feet beneath the Great Plains.
Especially because I'd been there! Down in one of those silos, under the bleak landscape of the Great Plains (this one in Grand Forks, N.D.), interviewing missile commanders like Blair (for a Harper's story), only a few years after Blair resumed life aboveground and retired.
In the course of talking to Minuteman commanders down in their underground launch capsules, I'd glimpsed what they might be called upon to do. They had the ability to launch from their underground pods up to 50 missiles able to kill 200,000 or 300,000 people each. You do the math.
They certainly had, and it showed beneath their black-humored jokes about coming above ground after a nuclear war and finding "only huge mutant bunny rabbits alive."
They were, thank God, not automatons. As Blair points out, their training system was designed to turn them into automatic button pushers, but the ones I spoke to retained a sharp sense of skeptical individuality. About the gravity of their "mission": killing that many people. And about the sketchy mechanics of it.
One crew member even disclosed to me a flaw in the "command and control" "permissive action" system that was supposed to prevent a madman missile commander from launching his "birds" and starting an apocalyptic nuclear war all by himself. The flaw: the system's susceptibility to the "spoon and string" improvisation.
So much focus has been placed—in film, fiction, and nonfiction—on our supposedly "failsafe" barrier to a lone-madman launch. We'd been told that to launch a missile, two keys must be inserted simultaneously into their slots by two separate launch officers, and that the slots for the keys were located at a sufficient distance from each other that one madman couldn't, say, shoot the other crewman and then use both his arms to twist both the keys simultaneously.
But the missile crewmen I talked to told me they'd figured out a way to defeat that impediment with a spoon and a string. Not that they were planning to do it, but that they knew someone could do it.
You just shoot the other guy and "rig up a thing where you tie a string to one end of a spoon," he told me, "and tie the other end to the guy's key. Then you can sit in your chair and twist your key with one hand while you yank on the spoon with the other hand to twist the other key over."
American ingenuity! Can't beat it for finding a new way to end the world.
I always wondered if I should follow up on what happened after I published this information. (In a piece reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune, I assumed the flaw had been fixed somehow, and have long credited myself with saving the world. Kidding!)
I actually turned down an invitation to lecture about such matters from the Air War College in Alabama* (because of my peacenik inclinations at the time), and assumed that if they read the article, they must have taken action to save the world from a lone madman with a spoon and string, to whom I'd in effect given instructions for an unauthorized missile launch that could destroy the world. (Hmmm, maybe I'd come close to destroying the world, rather than saving it. Sorry about that.)
But it's clear from Bruce Blair's "Nuclear Recollections" that the experience of holding the lives of tens of millions in his hands when he held those keys left a profound mark on him. I know that when the missile crewmen I was interviewing let me hold the keys, even twist them into the (deactivated) locks, that it had a profound effect on me. The keys to Kingdom Come!
And while I may have abandoned my responsibility for too long, I was grateful that Bruce G. Blair was still on the case, raising the right questions. In fact, he's devoted his subsequent life to raising the alarm about our flawed nuclear alarm and launch system, using what an actual missile commander learned about its dysfunctions and biases.
Blair's work continues and I think it's urgent, now that Putin's "nuclear bombers" are flying again, that Congress re-examine the whole issue and take seriously Blair's warnings about the variations of doomsday we still face.
Pay attention to Blair. You can't count on me to save the world again.
Correction, Sept. 5, 2007: This piece originally referred to the Army War College in Alabama. In fact, it's the Air War College that is sited in Alabama. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/
"Although effective human-to-human transmission of this virus has not yet occurred, the potential of the virus to acquire the ability is evident," said the researchers, who published their findings in the October issue of the U.S. journal PLoS Pathogens, which was released last week.
The group of nine scientific researchers, led by professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Tokyo, also found that the virus can spread by coughing and sneezing, signaling a potential for human-to-human transmission.
"We believe another mutation may be necessary (for the virus) to cause a pandemic," Kawaoka said. "As more humans are infected, the greater the chance that the mutation will evolve."
The researchers compared two H5N1-type viruses extracted from the throat and lung of a patient in Vietnam in 2004. They infected a mouse with the virus, and found it tended to grow in the upper respiratory tract, including the throat and nose, where flu viruses usually enter.
Researchers also found that the temperature in these parts is about 33, lower than the average temperature of mammals, which is 37. This indicates that this particular mutation allows H5N1 to live in the human upper respiratory tracts that have cooler temperatures. Normally, bird flu does not grow well in the throat or nasal passages of humans.
Kawaoka added that scientists need to closely monitor H5N1 avian flu viruses.
Last year, Kawaoka and other scientists found another mutation, which allows the virus to infect people more easily, raising the expectation that these findings could help scientists to predict the emergence of new strains.
(Source: Japan Times)
No one died, and regulators said the public was never at risk during these incidents. But the documented cases reflect poorly on procedures and oversight at high-security labs, some of which work with organisms and poisons so dangerous that illnesses they cause have no cure. In some cases, labs have failed to report accidents as required by law.
The mishaps include workers bitten or scratched by infected animals, skin cuts, needle sticks and more, according to a review by The Associated Press of confidential reports submitted to federal regulators. They describe accidents involving anthrax, bird flu virus, monkeypox and plague-causing bacteria at 44 labs in 24 states. More than two-dozen incidents were still under investigation.
The number of accidents has risen steadily. Through August, the most recent period covered in the reports obtained by the AP, labs reported 36 accidents and lost shipments during 2007 — nearly double the number reported during all of 2004.
Research labs have worked for years to find cures and treatments for diseases. However, the expansion of the lab network has been dramatic since President Bush announced an upgrade of the nation's bio-warfare defense program five years ago. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funds much of the lab research and construction, was spending spent about $41 million on bio-defense labs in 2001. By last year, the spending had risen to $1.6 billion.
The number of labs approved by the government to handle the deadliest substances has nearly doubled to 409 since 2004. Labs are routinely inspected by federal regulators just once every three years, but accidents trigger interim inspections.
"It may be only a matter of time before our nation has a public health incident with potentially catastrophic results," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee. Stupak's panel has been investigating the lab incidents and will conduct a hearing Thursday.
Lab accidents have affected the outside world: Britain's health and safety agency concluded there was a "strong probability" a leaking pipe at a British lab manufacturing vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease was the source of an outbreak of the illness in livestock earlier this year. Britain was forced to suspend exports of livestock, meat and milk products and destroy livestock. The disease does not infect humans.
Accidents aren't the only concern. While medical experts consider it unlikely that a lab employee will become sick and infect others, these labs have strict rules to prevent anyone from stealing organisms or toxins and using them for bioterrorism.
The reports were so sensitive the Bush administration refused to release them under the Freedom of Information Act, citing an anti-bioterrorism law aimed at preventing terrorists from locating stockpiles of poisons and learning who handles them.
Among the previously undisclosed accidents:
_In Rockville, Md., ferret No. 992, inoculated with bird flu virus, bit a technician at Bioqual Inc. on the right thumb in July. The worker was placed on home quarantine for five days and directed to wear a mask to protect others.
_An Oklahoma State University lab in Stillwater in December could not account for a dead mouse inoculated with bacteria that causes joint pain, weakness, lymph node swelling and pneumonia. The rodent — one of 30 to be incinerated — was never found, but the lab said an employee "must have forgotten to remove the dead mouse from the cage" before the cage was sterilized.
_In Albuquerque, N.M., an employee at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute was bitten on the left hand by an infected monkey in September 2006. The animal was ill from an infection of bacteria that causes plague. "When the gloves were removed, the skin appeared to be broken in 2 or 3 places," the report said. The worker was referred to a doctor, but nothing more was disclosed.
_In Fort Collins, Colo., a worker at a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facility found, in January 2004, three broken vials of Russian spring-summer encephalitis virus. Wearing only a laboratory coat and gloves, he used tweezers to remove broken glass and moved the materials to a special container. The virus, a potential bio-warfare agent, could cause brain inflammation and is supposed to be handled in a lab requiring pressure suits that resemble space suits. The report did not say whether the worker became ill.
Other reports describe leaks of contaminated waste, dropped containers with cultures of bacteria and viruses, and defective seals on airtight containers. Some recount missing or lost shipments, including plague bacteria that was supposed to be delivered to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in 2003. The wayward shipment was discovered eventually in Belgium and incinerated safely.
The reports must be submitted to regulators whenever a lab suffers a theft, loss or release of any of 72 substances known as "select agents" — a government list of germs and toxins that represent the horror stories of the world's worst medical tragedies for humans and animals.
A senior CDC official, Dr. Richard Besser, said his agency is committed to ensuring that U.S. labs are safe and that all such incidents are disclosed to the government. He said he was unaware of any risk to the public resulting from infections among workers at the high-security labs, but he acknowledged that regulators are worried about accidents that could go unreported.
"If you're asking if it's possible for someone to not report an infection, and have it missed, that clearly is a concern that we have," Besser said.
Texas A&M's laboratory failed to report, until this year, one case of a lab worker's infection from Brucella bacteria last year and three others' previous infection with Q fever — missteps documented in news reports earlier this year. The illnesses are characterized by high fevers and flu-like symptoms that sometimes cause more serious complications.
"The major problems at Texas A&M went undetected and unreported, and we don't think that it was an isolated event," critic Edward Hammond said. He runs the Sunshine Project, which has tracked incidents at other labs for years and first revealed the Texas A&M illnesses that the school failed to report.
Rules for working in the labs are tough and are getting more restrictive as the bio-safety levels rise. The highest is Level 4, where labs study substances that pose a "high risk of life-threatening disease for which no vaccine or therapy is available." Besides wearing wear full-body, air-supplied suits, workers undergo extensive background checks and carry special identification cards.
"The risk that a killer agent could be set loose in the general population is real," Hammond said.
In other lab accidents recounted in the reports, the Public Health Research Institute in Newark, N.J., was investigated by the FBI in 2005 when it couldn't account for three of 24 mice infected with plague bacteria. The lab and the CDC concluded the mice were cannibalized by other plague-infested mice or buried under bedding when the cage was sterilized with high temperatures.
The lab's director, Dr. David Perlin, told the AP it would be impossible for mice to escape from the building and said a worker failed to record their deaths.
"I feel 99 percent comfortable that was the case," Perlin said. "The animals become badly cannibalized. You only see bits and pieces. They're in cages with shredded newspaper. You really have to search hard with gloves and masks."
A worker at the Army's biological facility in Fort Detrick, Md., was grazed by a needle in February 2004 and exposed to the deadly Ebola virus after a mouse kicked a syringe. She was placed in an isolation ward called "The Slammer," but the Army said she did not become ill.
In other previously undisclosed accidents:
In Decatur, Ga., a worker at the Georgia Public Health Laboratory handled a Brucella culture in April 2004 without high-level precautions. She became feverish months later and tested positive for exposure at a hospital emergency room in July. She eventually returned to work. The lab's confidential report defended her: "The technologist is a good laboratorian and has good technique."
In April this year at the Loveless facility in Albuquerque, an African green monkey infected intentionally with plague-causing bacteria reached with its free hand and scratched at a Velcro restraining strap, cutting into the gloved hand of a lab worker. The injured worker at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute received medical treatment, including an antibiotic.
The National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa, reported leaks of contaminated waste three times in November and December 2006. While one worker was preparing a pipe for repairs, he cut his middle finger, possibly exposing him to Brucella, according to the confidential reports.
A researcher at the CDC's lab in Fort Collins, Colo., dropped two containers on the floor last November, including one with plague bacteria.
A worker at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research-Naval Medical Research Center in Silver Spring, Md., sliced through two pair of gloves while handling a rat carcass infected with plague bacteria. The May 2005 report said she was sent to an emergency room, which released her and asked her to return for a follow-up visit.
