Putin’s Dead Hand

Other voice 0:04

The doomsday machine is lost. If you keep it a secret, why didn't you tell the world, eh?

Jeffrey Lewis 0:20

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk weblog.

Aaron Stein 0:35

And I'm Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wong blog. I'm also an associate fellow at the Rural United Services Institute in London and a doctoral fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Jeffrey 0:45

Russia's last early warning satellite has stopped performing station keeping. The Russian Ministry of Defense has declared it non-operational. That leaves the Russians with no early warning satellites, Aaron. That's terrifying. Yeah, should we be worried?

Aaron 0:58

I don't know. You know who we should talk to?

Jeffrey 1:00

Oh, I do. We've got David Hoffman, a longtime Washington Post editor and reporter and author of The Magisterial Dead Hand, the untold story of the Cold War arms race and its dangerous legacy. How are you doing, David?

David Hoffman 1:15

Good. Thanks for having me.

Jeffrey 1:16

It's a little rocky start this morning, huh? Well, it's snowing here in Washington. So, David, let me just start off. We've had a whole bunch of discussions both on the blog and the podcast about the state of Russia's early warning system and the impact that has on strategic stability. And at some point, I think we're going to want to talk about perimeter.

But when you hear about the Russians having a gap for at least the next few months in their early warning capabilities, I mean do you shrug your shoulders or do you think, oh my god, we're all going to die?

David 1:53

I think there's not much we can do about it. I think that they're going to fix it, and they're probably going to fix it soon. So I'm not panicked about it. But GAPS have been with us for a long time. For much of the post-Soviet period, we've been worried about GAPS. This is the kind of thing where we ought to wish them success, get the satellites up there, because if we have eyes on each other, it's a safer place.

Aaron 2:18

Yeah, well, why don't you just fill that in a little bit then, just for the listeners who maybe aren't so – Up to date on Russian early warning systems and how these early warning satellites fit and why it's important that they have eyes on us, as you say.

David 2:32

So there's three levels to this problem, right? If you're watching an enemy's nuclear missiles, the Soviets and the Russians, and we have had three different ways to do it. One is from a very, very high satellites. One is from a lower level of satellites. And It's kind of tricky using these satellites. It's not always possible to see the contrails or the heat signatures of a missile taking off.

There have been false alarms because it's difficult to see that. So a third level, which is sort of confirmation, although the timelines are different, but a third level is to have these huge ground-based radars. And because of the way radar works, it can't see over the curvature of the Earth. So a satellite up high gets you that first possible warning, and then the ground-based radars can give you the confirmation, but it might come minutes later.

And since all of this is within maybe a matter of minutes, and minutes count in this kind of decision-making, obviously the soonest that you can get confirmation or warning that there's a missile attack, the better. But There's a lot of technical difficulty. The early Soviet and American satellites used kind of an infrared device to see the heat.

And sometimes this method would get really tricky when there was a place where this sort of the black background of space and the sort of milky twilight of it. Earth's atmosphere on the borders there, it was sometimes really hard to see what you were looking at. Now, both countries have improved a lot since that. But then there was a long period where the new Russia after the Soviet collapse had radar gaps on the ground.

You know, some of those radars were in outlying republics that became independent republics. Countries and they took the radars down. They've tried to build some new ones. They have much better coverage now. But I think that for stability, in other words, for avoiding surprise and keeping an eye on each other, here's a case where we should hope that Russia invests in good early warning systems.

And the better they can see us, the fewer surprises and vice versa.

Jeffrey 4:55

So, David, you mentioned the issue of false alarms. So I think that naturally leads us to the Petrov affair, right? So, you know, Pavel Podvig used to have this argument that – The existence of early warning satellites – he looked at the Petrov affair, which I'm going to ask you to explain, but said the fact that Russians have these glitchy early warning satellites, that's actually – that's worse than them having no satellites at all.

So he wrote this article a couple of years called If It's Broke, Don't Fix It. But on the other hand, like I'm terrified of them being blind and the kinds of things they might do. So maybe we could talk about false alarms a little bit. And sort through whether – how we think things might go horribly, horribly wrong.

Well, let's start with Petroff, right? Stanislav Petroff. Not least because it's an amazing story, right?

David 5:47

Yeah, I think it is. Stanislav Petroff was a kind of a math guy, an algorithms guy. He was a deputy head of one of these early warning stations. It was autumn of 1983, a very tense time during the Cold War. After the Korean airliner had been shot down. And, you know, he took a couple of duty shifts in the early warning system, although he was really, like I say, more of an algorithms guy.

And this was a station that received signals from one of these infrared satellites I mentioned that was looking for Against the black background of space and the edge of Earth and the atmosphere. It was looking for a possible missile arising. And the way these satellites worked is it would send a feed down to a big mainframe computer that was right there in the center where he worked.

One of his main jobs was really taking care of that computer. And it sent a lot of signals. I mean, dozens and dozens and the computer would sort through and say, Oh no, that's, you know, that's the glint of the sun off of a cloud. That's a, that's a flock of geese. Ah, You know, mathematically, this one looks like a real signal.

It would sort them. So one night he took a duty shift. Maybe the other guys were out drinking or something, but it wasn't his normal thing to do. And in the middle of the duty shift, he got a launch signal. First, that there had been one missile. So this indicated to him, at least, that the computer had looked at the signal coming from the satellite and said, you know, There appears to be one missile.

It was a serious alarm on the screen kind of a thing. But Petrov, you know, he was kind of a thoughtful guy, and he wasn't prone to panic. And he thought, they're not going to attack us with just one missile. And he thought, like, let's wait and see what happens. And then, of course, the thing went off again and again, and it got to five.

And then it reached a different level where it starts flashing on this big screen, start, you know, launch, launch. And it looked a lot more serious. And he called his commander and he basically said, you know, he made a guts decision. He was scared to death. He told me, he says, I felt like my feet were on a frying pan.

You know, I was scared to death. But I told him, I think it's a false alarm. As a result of his judgment, that didn't escalate. Didn't, you know, get any more dangerous than that. But you can imagine what was going through his mind. And he knew how the system worked. I mean, he knew a lot more than the guys above him knew.

So that was a very, very famous false alarm, not the only one. There were similar American false alarms in the history of this whole period. And I think the Petrov one is particularly telling because it really came down to one man's instinct.

Aaron 8:32

He made the right call. I mean so the ultimate thing is like what if he didn't make the right call? And how does that then build into the early warning time? By compressing the time, if the Russians don't have more time to make these decisions, are we in a place where things have become slightly destabilizing? All of a sudden, with the assumption that they will have a new satellite up by June, I think June 2015 is the date that we're being told.

David 8:56

So all these satellites and radars give the national leader, the national command authority, time to make a decision. And they help that person if there's an alert, judge is it for real or not. And, you know, we do know one case in 1995 where at least it became an issue where the An alert went all the way to Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.

But we don't know much else about how the Soviet system worked or how many false alarms they had. But we know that they, like us, wanted to create a world where they had more time to examine the evidence and make a decision before they made a catastrophic error. Generally, we're looking at 30 minutes. Maybe less. And if the ground-based radars don't pick it up, it might be 12 minutes from when they see something.

So the effort here is very intense to get all the data and confirmation you can in a short period and transmit that information to the leader as quickly as possible without making a mistake.

Jeffrey 9:57

So there's – David, have you seen – I guess there's a movie now about Petrov. Is that right called The Man Who Saved the World?

David 10:04

I haven't seen it but there is a movie. I was interviewed for the movie and it's – I haven't seen it. Yeah.

Jeffrey 10:09

So I mean I think the weirdest thing that strikes me is it's not like – I mean he gets a movie made about him but it's not like he gets rewarded for saving the world, right? Yeah.

David 10:21

No, actually, you know, his decision, I think, was hidden for a long time. And when I talked to him, he was for the first time he was actually kind of a poor pensioner living in far distant edge of Moscow. And he had a rough life and a rough time after that.

Jeffrey 10:39

Yeah, so I mean he was – he wasn't rewarded, right? He was like criticized for not following procedures or is that a bit of urban law?

David 10:47

I never saw the criticism. I've talked to him about the event at length. But the point is there was no ticker tape parade.

Aaron 10:56

Even though we were still alive to have one. Right. That's just unfathomable. But go ahead, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 11:02

Well, so I was going to ask about – I think maybe it's a good place to begin talking about the command and control system and the way that the Russians think about the problem. You mentioned 1995, which is the Black Brant episode where a US-Norwegian sounding rocket is launched from Norway and the Soviet warning system picks it up.

Aaron 11:24

We're mixing Soviet and Russian too much? Oh, right. Sorry.

Jeffrey 11:28

Well, it's the Soviet system inherited by Russia, right? Right. Look, if Mr. Putin keeps it up, I'm not going to have to make that distinction anymore. Right.

Aaron 11:36

That's where I was going with that joke.

Jeffrey 11:40

But – so I mean what lesson do you take from that? I mean I know there are some people who think it wasn't quite as serious as it was presented and I want to talk a little bit about how – we've had this debate in the United States about whether the Russians were exaggerating or downplaying their warning problems.

But what lesson do you take away from the 1995 Black Brant incident?

David 12:01

So I recently studied this very carefully within the last year. And my impression from looking closely at it is that there was one failure, which is when the notification came to the Russian foreign ministry that there was going to be an experimental scientific rocket launch off the coast of Norway. The notice got lost. So the first big error was – That the Russian Defense Ministry and strategic rocket forces and early warning system did not know that this scientific rocket was going to take off.

Secondly, it was a four-stage rocket that had not been used before, and it was being launched in the early phase on a trajectory that would be similar to, not identical, but similar to what a Trident submarine might launch somewhere in the same vicinity. However, this rocket, once it was launched, essentially headed south, Toward the North Pole and not toward Moscow.

In other words, it didn't come. So there was only a short period, I think probably 20 seconds, when it might have appeared to a Russian observer by radar to be a potential threat. And then, of course, over time, you'd see which way it was going. It was going away. And to the north. But it did get picked up by one of these ground-based radars that I mentioned.

And that then caused an alert to be sent through their system. And I think after we get finished with this, we should talk about that system. But suffice it to say that it's a system that has a series of suitcases, not unlike ours, In which the National Command Authority, the president of the country, would be alerted. And Boris Yeltsin said on that day, on that occasion, the alert went high enough that he opened the thing.

Now, we don't know what happened when he opened it because there's no eyewitnesses and no testimony. But my study of the timelines, not only based on my work, but based on Ted Postol's work and based on Pavel Poldvig's work and others, is that by the time Yeltsin got that alert, the missile was probably safely Headed in the other direction.

There was not really enough time. I think maybe a minute and a half was all that we're talking about here. There's just no way that it could have appeared threatening after that. So I think that probably this is a case where the system went off and then nothing happened. It gained a lot more danger And over-interpretation in the telling.

And for various reasons, at the time, Yeltsin was engaged in a horrible early stages of the war in Chechnya. He wanted to look strong, and the Russian military was very depressed. And there may be reasons why he exaggerated it. There may be reasons why people who have studied it have used it as an icon for Danger, which I think the dangers are very real and we can talk about that.

But in this particular case, the scientific rocket, which might have looked a little bit like it was coming out of a Trident submarine for a minute and a half, was well on its way to the North Pole and away from Moscow by the time I think that Boris Yeltsin opened that suitcase and no action was taken.

Jeffrey 15:05

So I actually want to talk a little bit about that early warning system. I don't know if you saw this, David, but – And in true arms control wonk podcast style, I'm going to murder this.

Aaron 15:17

But Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Jeffrey 15:21

Perfect. Ah, don't tell me that. That ruins the effect. It just carried an article by a Russian colonel that described the routine early warning system, which I guess is called Kazbet.

David 15:38

Look, let me – if you don't mind, Jeff, since we're in full wonk mode here, can I give you a quick schematic or sketch about this system?

Jeffrey 15:44

I like how you – yeah, you act like you need permission. And anybody who downloads something called the Arms Control Wonk Podcast expects the full schematic.

David 15:54

Okay, here's the full schematic, okay? First of all, the – Like us, the Soviets came to conclusion that to get information fast to the people who make decisions, you needed these little remote terminals, right? They – or suitcases. We call ours the nuclear football. Theirs was developed much later than ours. It only came into use in the early Gorbachev period.

But it was a communications terminal in a Samsonite suitcase kind of a thing, a briefcase-sized thing, and that was called the Chiget, okay? It was a communications device, not necessarily an authorization device. There were three of them, and why three? Because the Soviets traditionally had a different Command system than we did, right? They had three power centers.

The General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, number one. Number two, the Defense Minister. And number three, the Chief of the General Staff. And that was because their actual launch... Their actual launch facility was at the general staff. So they had these – all three of those people had a Chiget, although obviously they didn't vote or anything.

As I said, it was a monitoring device. But it's interesting that it had three different – Locations like this. They were all connected by a communication system that was called Kavkaz. The Kavkaz referred to the cables, relays, satellites, everything that connected them. It was redundant, multiply redundant. Then in the General Staff, There was a computer system called Baxan.

And Baxan was to essentially send the orders to the strategic rocket forces for the missiles, the land-based missiles, to the Navy for submarine-based missiles, and to the Air Force for air power. And Furthermore, the early warning system would come to the general staff. In other words, the material from the satellites, from the radars or something, on something called crocus.

So there are four things here that I've mentioned. Shiget are the briefcases. Kavkaz is the overall system. Baxan is the command thing that actually sends the commands under, you know, again, I'm not talking about an emergency here, but I'm talking about... Enough of a situation where they're up and running to the various services. And then Crocus brings them the early warning information.

Now, there's one more I haven't mentioned, which is the perimeter system, which I hope we'll get to. So that's the basics of it.

Jeffrey 18:34

Is that clear? Crystal clear. And, I mean, I think one of the things I should point out to readers is, like, you figured that out the hard way. In terms of interviewing Russians and digging deep. But now it stinks for you because somebody can come along and they can read your book and then they can go grab this article by this Russian colonel and they can pretend that they know as much as you do.

But we couldn't do it if you hadn't dug all this stuff out.

David 19:06

I'd like to take the credit, but there was one person before me He's now passed away, but his name was Valeriy Arinich. Yeah, we want to talk about him too. He was a very dear friend and a person I had known for many, many years. And he published all of this information quite courageously in a book that nobody paid any attention to.

You know what, David?

Jeffrey 19:28

I got the last copy from Bruce Blair at Global Zero. And we've scanned it. And with Bruce's blessing, since it was published through CDI at the time, we're going to put it online. Great.

Aaron 19:44

So it will be available to the Wong community.

Jeffrey 19:46

Yeah. So no one will have the excuse not to understand how Russian early warning systems work.

David 19:54

So there's a wonderful series of charts, but the most important one on this subject is on page 151. And I have to say, people who look at this book should know how utterly courageous Jarinich was in writing all this material. And there were people in the United States government that wondered, is he for real? You know, how can this be?

But here is a guy who put his convictions first, and his convictions were that we had entered a period of overkill, A dangerous period, and he wanted to start a dialogue between Russia at the time and the United States about these dangers. He really fervently believed it, and he had come out of the military. He spent his entire life in the rocket forces and in the general staff.

And he brought us single-handedly more information, and actually that has led to more and better understanding than anybody else in the Cold War.

Jeffrey 20:50

David, I really want to ask you about Perimeter. But before we do, I wanted to ask you just a general question, which is it was very courageous when your image did it. And it was amazing when you were able to put this stuff in your book. But I also remember when Pavel Podvig published his book on Russian forces and the Russian authorities were not happy.

David 21:08

Right. In fact, they were so unhappy they came in. Seized the physical books in his office, and they carted him out to a truck, and then one of the agents that had seized his books, you know, like maybe 150 or 200, he didn't have too many, comes back holding one of the books and says, Pavel, would you sign this for me?

You're just going to keep one?

Jeffrey 21:31

It's a true story. Well, Pavel's hanging out in Geneva now, right? He's where you are, Aaron.

David 21:36

Yeah, he's right around the corner. He's a frequent lunch buddy of mine. But you're right. They didn't – they were not happy and they seized his book.

Jeffrey 21:43

So why – but now in the past, I'd say, year, there have been two official-ish – I emphasize ish – accounts of the command and control system. One in – I guess is it Rosaya Gazeta, which is – Official government newspaper. Right. And now this new one in – I'm not going to say it twice because I said it so perfectly the first.

I mean I'm not going to ruin it.

Aaron 22:09

You should say it again because you have to butcher it in order to keep with our podcast legacy.

Jeffrey 22:13

Cosmo Askaya Pravda. This is terrible, which is written by a colonel. So there are now these really explicit official descriptions of the early warning system. Why do you think they're doing this now?

David 22:28

You know, we're in a period of tension, right? And these periods come and go. I don't want to be sanguine about it. It worries me greatly, but there have been others too. 1983 was one. And when you're in a period of tension, I think, and you have limited resources, you make the most of what you have. And I think that To some people, these things sound frightening and scary.

I think maybe the Kremlin is trying to emphasize to the Russian people their strength or even trying to exaggerate it. So I'm not at all surprised to see lots of imagery and talk about military strength. I just think we have to be realistic about it. The Russians have been flying these bombers over Russia. The English channel and not turning on their transponders.

It's dangerous not to turn on your transponder, but if you take a look at some of these Duplovs, you know, they're 50 years old. They're as old as some of our oldest B-52s. They're propeller driven. They're very slow. I don't think they would actually be a big military threat. They're more like a nuisance threat and an irritant.

And they're, they're a threat to

Aaron 23:36

Civilian aviation too, because without their transponders on. But I think this is also a little bit in that category of bravado. Yeah, well, no, it also comes at a time where it sort of exacerbates one of being over here on the continent of something that's being debated a lot, which is decreased military spending. But I, I want to bring this back to the, the early warning system and, and.

I guess the concerns about whether it's autonomous, semi-autonomous, and what we would really do in the event – what the Russian system looks like on the final lake that you talked about in your book.

David 24:12

Right. I mentioned the sort of normal situation, right? And there was one other element to the Soviet system which was kept secret throughout – really until the end of the Soviet Union, and that was the system we call perimeter or – which I – Which has been called the Dead Hand, mostly in the West but sometimes by Russians as well.

And this was a special system. They called it a reserve system. And it was something they built so that they could guarantee retaliation in the event the Kremlin was decapitated. You have to remember that they greatly feared decapitation. They feared it especially because of the fast-flying Pershing missiles from Europe, and also, although they didn't talk about it much, I think they feared that cruise missiles could fly under their radars because they had a big low-altitude gap with their radars, and the cruise missiles could sneak under it without being detected.

Jeffrey 25:04

As Matthias Roos demonstrated graphically when he landed in Red Square.

David 25:07

Well, they actually detected him, but they just were all It was border guards day and they couldn't stop him. But they detected him. But a cruise missile might go under those radars completely and that worried them. So the idea that they could be decapitated, that essentially the Kremlin could be hit with a nuclear explosion before they could get out and that they'd be leaderless led them to want to build some kind of system of guaranteed retaliation.

So I'd like to talk about it in two things. The first thing to say about it is It was called Perimeter. It was a system of emergency command that would essentially allow the launch of their nuclear deterrent if their leaders had been decapitated or wiped out in the Kremlin. This briefly was a deep, hardened underground bunker in the shape of a sphere, very deep and very hardened, probably the most secure place of all time in the Cold War.

And there would be a couple of duty officers in this place. And this bunker would then have links to a series of very conventional missiles that were sort of like The ss20s they were sort of normal small i call them baby rockets sometimes they weren't huge intercontinental ballistic missiles but they were big and they were command missiles and if the guys in the bunker gave the launch command these command missiles would rise out of their silos fly the long distance of the soviet union 11 time zones and give the commands electronically to all the missile silos below to launch It was an emergency system.

The idea being that by flying the command from these missiles, even if nuclear war was happening on the ground, the commands could get through. In other words, it wasn't dependent on landlines. It wasn't dependent on cell towers. It wasn't dependent on people on the ground. But here's the real thing. The linchpin was – Do the guys in the bunker give the yes or no command?

And when and under what circumstances? So the thing was constructed so that there was a pre-delegation switch. In other words, for it to work, somebody in the Kremlin had to first flip the switch to turn it on. They had to still be alive to do that. Caught totally by surprise, they wouldn't have time to do that. This is a very, very vague issue about how it works.

I'm not certain. But we do know that the conditions for the guys in the bunker were the following. One, the release of the switch had to be on. They had to. Have a green light from the Kremlin that the system was on. Now you can imagine it might have been turned on hours or minutes earlier. If there was a crisis brewing, someone might have turned it on the night before.

It's not clear to me exactly how long.

Jeffrey 28:00

Right, right. You flip it on and the general secretary can take a sleeping pill and – Right, or he can flip it on and run to the subway system that would have carried it on.

David 28:10

Or what conditions it would be flipped on. Right, right, right. Second requirement, there had to be a complete loss of communication with the national command authority. So not only did they have to flip it on, but then you also had to basically realize you were completely cut off from them. There was a system to determine that if the, if the links went down, that was the second green light came.

And the third one was they had a complex system of sensors. The sensors were for overpressure Sound of, of nuclear detonations. And essentially the third issue was, are we under nuclear attack? That you had to have a positive response that you were under nuclear attack from these sensors in order to launch. So if you're a guy in the bunker and all three conditions are green, pre-delegation has happened, communications with the National Command Authority have been cut off, confirmed, and the country is under nuclear attack.

You can launch. Now, the real issue here is if you're a couple of duty officers and all three lights are green, do you robotically issue the launch command and let fly with all of the Soviet Union's nuclear deterrent? Or do you not? And there are people that argue that these duty officers were trained to be automatons, to be robotic, that of course they would have.

Valery Arinich argued that there was still A human dimension at that moment, that those guys were still people and that they would have had real doubts and real difficulty in making that decision, that they were more like Petrov than like robots. And here is where there was a boundary between the question of, is this an automatic system or a semi-automatic system?

Because the Soviets did look briefly, I don't know how long, but for a while at a totally computer-driven Automatic system. And they decided against it. Maybe they decided against it because their computers were primitive. Maybe they decided against it because it was just downright dangerous. But they put this human firewall in this deep, safe bunker and let those guys decide.

I think there were three duty officers. There were three conditions that had to be met. We could talk all day and imagine how they would have responded in that circumstance. But I think... It was a semi-automatic system that did have one last human firewall, and really the fate of the Earth depended – at that point, nuclear war has already started.

The fate of the rest of the Earth may have depended on what kind of guys they were. Now, I'd like to add one last thing. The Soviets built this whole thing. It was stalled for a while because they couldn't make it work, and Valeriy Arlinich helped them finish it. He actually brought it across the goal line. He helped them unstuck some of the problems they were having including issues of exactly how to broadcast some of these commands and what they would do under these circumstances.

He was actually very, very good at sort of figuring this stuff out and the thing went on duty in early 1985 right as Mikhail Gorbachev took power. But the Soviets never told us about it. In other words, they didn't do this to sort of frighten us, saying, we have guaranteed retaliation. Don't lay a finger on us. They kept it secret.

And, you know, that was a great tragedy and a big mistake. It would have had some deterrent power and might have been easier for us to understand if they had actually told us and boasted about it or at least leaked it or something so we would know it was there. But actually, it became more dangerous because they didn't tell us about it.

Jeffrey 31:59

Well, it's precisely that scene in Dr. Strangelove, right? Where it's like the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you don't tell the world about it.

David 32:07

Right, and Valeri felt that they had made a serious mistake keeping it secret. And when he told me that, when I realized that he believed that, And this drove a lot of his subsequent actions because he believed we had kind of reached a point of danger and he wanted to pull everybody back from that point of danger.

He had to understand it.

Aaron 32:27

Isn't that reflective of like how palpable they thought the threat of decapitation was? I mean in something that maybe on our side we didn't consider as much as we should have?

David 32:37

You know, to answer that really requires you to get inside their heads in a way we have never been able to fully understand. I'm just reluctant to answer because I don't know what they were thinking except for the evidence that we're talking about today that we could look at, what Valeri brought out, what they built. There was a big debate for many, many years.

Did they envision a first strike or were they solely retaliatory? They built a lot of stuff that would indicate that basically they were solely retaliatory. But They built a few things that caused us, especially in the Reagan years, to fear that they were after a first strike. And looking back on it, I find this first strike discussion to be to seem a little odd because it seems to me that by and large, it was easier technically for them to build retaliatory mechanisms.

But, you know, you had to be in their heads. And I'm still to this. I don't think anybody knows for sure what was in their heads.

Jeffrey 33:34

Well, on that subject of trying to get in their heads, David – and maybe I'm wrong about this. But my recollection is that the first time that we really started to engage with the idea that there was this perimeter system was when BDM did this study where they went through in the mid-1990s and tried to – Interview former Soviet officials and several of them alluded to the existence of this system and they gave kind of conflicting accounts about what it was and why it was built.

But it was kind of – as I understand, the first time that the US government started to get feedback like, oh, hey – There is this retaliatory system, and it's at least partially automated. And this was a big debate that we had internally, so we can tell you about it now because at least for that brief moment, things looked better.

David 34:25

Well, the chronology is not – so this study that you mentioned was commissioned by Andrew Marshall to try and answer the question raised by Team A and Team B back in the 70s. Essentially, what were they thinking? And it was an oral history project in which a fellow who had good Russian – And good experience with these things, went to the Soviet Union in 1989.

So it actually began before the end of the Soviet Union. And this fellow did a lot of oral history interviews with their key decision makers. Things were opening then during perestroika. And so we could at least ask them the question, you know, what were you thinking? And so you got, you know, It was a little awkward and the Cold War was still on even if it was the dying embers.

And this oral history we now have, the project was incomplete. The guy who was working on it finished in 94 and I mean he quit. He just didn't finish it. Right. But we have what we have and it's – it is what it is but I wouldn't – It doesn't seem to me to answer the question yet.

Jeffrey 35:30

No, I don't think it does. In fact, one of the things I find that's interesting about it is – in some way, it's why I like it, right? Because it's so inconclusive. It's like actually talking to people where you get nine different stories, which in some ways is more like real life. But I guess my question is when did we in the West become aware of this system?

Is that – it's my recollection that that's the first time.

David 35:56

I can answer that.

Jeffrey 35:57

That's why we got you on the podcast.

David 35:59

Sorry. No, great. For people who are listening to us today and would like to read this, it's called The Hines Report and it's published As on the National Security Archives website. We'll put up a link as part of the show notes. It'll be at the bottom. Secondly, so we became aware of this when Bruce Blair, who was writing a book, who was working on Soviet command and control, bumped into Valery Yarinich, my friend, who was then friends with some people at an institute in Moscow.

And Bruce started talking to him. And this was 19... I think 1993, 92, 93. OK. So this is the work on the logic of accidental nuclear war? Maybe. OK. We'll ask Bruce. So Bruce then published – he was then at Brookings and he published an op-ed about this system, revealing it to the world in I believe October of 1993 in the New York Times.

And after he published it, actually Valeria then submitted one. And the difference between the two is that they were having this discussion really about was it automatic or semi-automatic. Bruce thought that there was a lot of automation. Valeri thought we had a human firewall. But anyway, that's when it first came to the attention of the West. That's how it came out.

Now, I have since asked people in the CIA, what did you know? And here's what they said. They said, we knew about the emergency rockets. We had telemetry of them flying. And actually, Bruce himself also knew about that telemetry. But the thing is, so they saw the hardware. They also saw some of the command centers being built and other bits of hardware.

But the thing that they lacked and couldn't put together that Bruce put together was the software. In other words, what the hell was it for? They saw these baby rockets flying, issuing commands, but they couldn't figure out what they were doing. So we learned from Bruce Blair's op-ed. He's the guy that brought it to the attention of the West.

Jeffrey 38:01

I'm glad we gave Bruce credit because Bruce is a friend. I would have felt terrible if we didn't give him the right amount of credit.

David 38:10

I tell the story, this whole story for people listening to us who want to learn more. I tell the whole story about how it came out in the dead hand.

Jeffrey 38:17

Yeah, that's going to be my reading recommendation, not to spoil it.

Aaron 38:21

I'm curious. It's going back a little bit. It's like did we have any sense about what would have them flick the button in the Kremlin, what the crisis situation would be to put these guys on alert down in the capsule? And then let's say the secondary sensors go off because they feel that they're under nuclear attack. And then they send up the baby rockets, as you say, with command and control issues.

Did we have a sense of how – what would trigger the Russians to actually put this thing into effect?

David 38:52

That question has never been answered. I remind you there are three conditions, right? You have to have pre-delegation. You have to have lost – Contact with the National Command Authority, and you have to have the sensor information. But to this day, we don't know very much about that pre-delegation switch. I was told at one point in the 90s, in the late 90s, early 2000s, that Yeltsin had essentially turned off that part of perimeter.

In other words, the command rockets existed, the baby rockets, the bunker was still staffed, but the whole Soviet... Thing of having that switch had actually been shut down in that period of time. It may be true or may not be. But I think today where we stand is we just don't know how this system works. We see these reports in the Russian press that it still exists.

I'm not surprised. You know, they're very good at preserving their assets and they kept this thing going. But here's the real issue. The three-legged stool I mentioned, right, the general secretary of the Communist Party, the defense minister and the chief of the general staff, The guys that had the Chiget briefcases. Did the new Russia maintain that tripartite command system?

It sounds a little unwieldy. Well, the new Russia had an elected president. You know, did they need the other two guys? Well, they did keep it. They kept it partly because that's what they had. I know well through the 90s and the time Valeria wrote this book, it still was in existence. But what's the relationship of those three?

And here's where it gets murky. I've been told that actually the three briefcases had an interlock, that if the National Command Authority was somehow out of position or couldn't open or wouldn't respond, then the others were paralyzed. But I don't know much about that interlock. I don't know whether or not this was a system in which you needed three permissions or just a single permission from the National Command Authority and the other two guys were watching.

And when Dmitry Medvedev was president of Russia in that one term in between Putin An interesting article was written by a very knowledgeable fellow who raised the question at the time. He said if Putin is the real power of the country and he's prime minister and Medvedev is the president but he's the sort of – at least on paper, the guy with the briefcase, then – and the prime minister did not have a briefcase.

Putin for four years did not have one. And yet we had these two guys in the military who did. Who's in control? Well, that question has now been resolved a little because Putin has gone back to the presidency. But still, I think that there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot we don't know about how it works and what the procedures are.

And that goes back to our earlier discussion about the timeline. It's very important to know who's got to make decisions and how they make them to appreciate whether or not they have an adequate early warning timeline and whether they have adequate information coming into it.

Jeffrey 41:46

Well, let me bring this up into the present day because we're in a situation where the Russians don't have any early warning satellites. And even if they begin launching them again, I mean it's indicative of the fact that no system is perfect, right? And no system is complete. Right. Do we have to worry about strategic stability issues?

I certainly remember in the mid-1990s, there was a leaked CIA document that reported that there was a former SRF officer, which could have been Uranich for all we know, but apparently had said that the command and control equipment often malfunctions and on more than one occasion has switched spontaneously to combat mode. So I worry about a scenario where Because we're in a crisis, perimeter is either turned on or it turns on automatically and the people in the bunker are primed to think we might have a conflict.

And it just seems to me, although it's – there are these multiple conditions, like it's just not that hard to imagine that the communications links are down on any given day. Right. And, and, and, you know, like you're, you're, you're too, you know, so it's then, then it's the guys in the bunker get a, get a false radiation reading, you know, and, and I often think back to the B-52 crash in Greenland where As Scott Sagan documents this nicely, we had this redundant command and control system where if the base was knocked out, we'd know that a Soviet attack was underway.

But the problem was because it's in Greenland, the weather was bad and so the communications were always down. So then they thought, well, we'll put this bomber up. And if the bomber is down and the communications are down – Then we'll know. But then they put radiation sensors on the ground. And of course, right, like the bomber crashes and dumps the plutonium on top of the radiation sensors, you know, and it's only because like communications are up that day that you don't get this kind of perverse and surprising false alarm.

So I guess my question is, took me a long time to ask you, David, but. I can certainly imagine how a system, whether we think of it as automated or semi-automated, can be spoofed. And maybe that's fine in the 1990s and 2000s when relations are basically good. But given how intense the conflict is over Ukraine and the frequent Russian references to their – Like could we be heading into like a 1983-like situation where there's a lot more anxiety in the Kremlin than we think?

Aaron 44:25

Yeah, just to build on – that's why I asked the unanswerable question.

David 44:28

When do they turn it off? There's just a lot of unknowables here because we don't know about when they turn it on or off or even if perimeter, how it functions with the National Command Authority. We don't really know the relationship of the command authority to the military and they haven't talked much about it. So I feel uncomfortable not knowing some of these things.

I also think we could speculate endlessly about technical failure on their side, and certainly we've seen a lot of evidence of technical difficulties in the long lean years. But they have modernized. They have had some money. I don't worry as much about technical failure, which I sometimes think of as something we can't do very much about. What I worry about is actually something more systemic that we can do something about, and that's this.

Both sides maintain this outdated Cold War idea of launch-ready alert. You know, it was the famous cock pistols deterrence. You know, it had a certain logic. We could debate it, but let's just stipulate for a minute. It had a certain logic in the period of Cold War deterrence. But I'm not sure that it has the same logic today, even in a period of tension over Ukraine.

We have our missiles on four-minute launch-ready alert. Our land-based missiles and our submarines on about 12 minutes, launch ready alert. I assume theirs are relatively similar. So when we talk this whole discussion about getting evidence, avoiding mistakes, seeing the other side with clear eyes, a lot of it is wrapped up in the question of how much time do you have to make that decision.

Well, if everybody is on very, very tight schedules here, if the timelines are four minutes or 12 minutes, that really compresses the ability of a very complex set of technical factors to fall into place. One thing that both sides could do. Is just to negotiate a verifiable bilateral way to take our nuclear weapons, our fast-flying ones, off of launch-ready alert.

And by saying off, I'm not saying, you know, not forever. But you know what? If you could verifiably build two hours into a system like this, You might save the world that way. Or if you could, you know, verifiably build a day. I mean, and the thing that bugs me about this, I'm open to the technicalities, but this is really the third rail.

This is the thing that neither side ever wants to discuss that everybody in the military will insist today. We got to have this. You know, I was recently in a briefing where air force guy said, you know, absolutely not. It would be too dangerous. Now we, and of course we shouldn't do anything unilaterally because that, You know, it's not how you should deal with an adversary.

But I also think that it might be possible if we had creative minds and everybody realized how dangerous it is to have missiles on four-minute launch-ready alert. That's the time, by the way. The four minutes is the time from when the president gives the order. To the time when the missiles take off. It takes them another 30 minutes to hit their targets.

So, you know, it's in both sides' interest, even at a time when you're hashing it out in Ukraine and when relations are very, very tense, to think about whether or not we have this anachronism that it actually is a systemic thing we could change. And it's quite dangerous.

Jeffrey 47:47

I actually wrote a column in Foreign Policy making this argument when it became clear that cooperative threat reduction programs were going to end. It really strikes me that so much of our arms control efforts have focused on limiting numbers, and what we were never able to do is talk about command and control. At the end of the day, I tend to be sympathetic to the argument that what really drives the Russians is this fear of decapitation.

And so one of the things that we pressed the Obama administration on very hard and got into the nuclear posture review, which I'm very proud of, but then nothing happened with it, which I'm not so proud of, is this idea of maximizing the president's decision time. Because you're right. I mean it seems to me that that is where all of this – That is where strategic stability can break down, right, when you have an incredibly limited amount of time to make an incredibly important decision and you're trying to do it under pressure and you're trying to do it with incomplete information.

And it just seems to me that that's the kind of thing that we were never able to get the arms control process to touch, which is kind of a bummer.

David 48:54

And I can explain why. The Joint Chiefs believe that if you do this, sort of this stand down, then you will create an incentive in a crisis to essentially reestablish the high alert without the other side knowing. In other words, you create the incentive for a re-alerting race. I've heard this a lot. I don't believe it, but I also have not been able to disprove it.

And, you know, I think this is sort of the cutting edge of where the thinking is. It's certainly the argument that is used in the United States military against any kind of change in the status quo. I mean, there's a more elementary thing, which is, you know, these guys have been put in charge of maintaining these 400 some missiles.

And so they want to have their powder dry and their guns ready. But on a sort of theoretical level. They've claimed whenever this has been brought up, well, if you build it an hour, then they're going to cheat and they're going to take advantage of that hour and we'll be an hour behind or two hours behind and they'll secretly re-alert and we won't know it.

That's unstable. On the other hand, they don't have a very good answer to the argument that four minutes in this day and age is just – it's just dangerous. Right.

Jeffrey 50:10

Well, I'm actually a little sympathetic to the re-alerting argument if all you're doing is making – they're good and bad de-alerting proposals, right? And I – I have been sympathetic to the argument that physical de-alerting proposals might actually shrink the president's decision time for precisely this reason, that the chairman of the joint chiefs will be saying like, no, no, no, we have to start re-alerting now.

Wait a minute, Jeffrey.

David 50:32

I want you to answer to me then. Why is the Chinese have not – why is it they have minimal deterrence and they actually do not make the warheads and the missiles? I mean is there something magical in what we and the Russians have that the Chinese have figured is not important? Or are they going to eventually wind up doing it too?

Jeffrey 50:48

Well, so first of all, I'm afraid they're going to wind up doing it too. And I am worried that they talk about alerting in a crisis to send a signal. But I think the reason they don't do it – and I think this is the key that kind of unlocks how you can engage in de-alerting to increase decision time.

And Walt Slocum has made this argument. What you have to do is you have to make changes to the posture as a whole. I mean if you try to do business like we do business now at lower levels of alert – That's crazy. But if you don't, if you realize – we de-alert things all the time in the sense that we decide weapons are excess to our strategic requirements.

And so if you alter your posture so that you're planning to, for example, ride out an attack, which is what I would prefer, then de-alerting I think becomes a cinch. Because what you're doing is you're saying – you're having the president give the guidance that I want forces that I don't have to make that decision in a matter of minutes.

I don't want to rely on alert rates to ride out. I want to rely on other things. So for example, shifting most of the force to submarines. You know, thinking about if you're going to keep anything that's land-based, thinking about, you know, basing modes that – again, so they don't have to rely on alert for survivability. But I got to tell you, I'm terrified, right, because the Chinese are building submarines that carry ballistic missiles and they have mobile missiles.

And I'm absolutely horrified that they might – or terrified that they might look at our postures and go, oh, this alert thing. Maybe that's how we could guarantee the survivability of our forces. And then I think we're in a lot of trouble.

Aaron 52:29

I mean is there any appetite or any discussions about – we're talking about the US side now. I mean at times of tension with the Russians that we're having now and with them having a different conception of their nuclear weapons. I mean how they're usable, what they're supposed to be used for. On their side, does de-alerting make any sense for them?

David 52:47

Well, I think it – I'm going to try and answer that, Aaron, but I'm not sure I'm an expert on this. But from what I know and understand and listening to them talk about it, it doesn't make sense when they're under pressure like they are now, backs to the wall. Having a scary deterrent is what they want.

And so – I think it's going to be very, very hard to persuade them. But there's a secondary factor. They don't like to talk about it now in this particular moment, but it exists. And that is the entire definition of deterrence to them is measured against the United States. In other words, it's not measured against anybody else.

And so if they do, and they know that we have technical superiority, we have much greater accuracy, we actually have, you know, a large number of forces in those warehouses that are part of the strategic reserve. There are a lot of things that we have that worry them strategically if it ever really came to it. And I think, you know, beyond the hysterics and the emotions of the period that we're in, the one thing that could bring them to Come to some kind of agreement on this is the fact that our system is as threatened to them as theirs is to us.

And that threat is actually even a little greater because of our technical superiority.

Aaron 54:03

What freaks me out is that you're seeing linkages to, on their side, to conventional weapons.

David 54:09

And one other thing I want to add to that, which is part of what you just said, but one of the things – one of the ways I think they're reacting to our strategic superiority and which has not come to the public's attention very much is I think they're looking for asymmetry. And I think they will continue to modernize maybe with asymmetry.

They're going to realize now this is not the Cold War and they cannot go toe-to-toe with us strategically anymore. And, you know, they look at how far we've come and they're doing some things like modernizing the submarine force and so on. But I think what we're really going to wake up one day and find out is quietly they've been trying to look for asymmetry in other technologies.

And other kinds of delivery systems. And that worries me because for a long time until this economic crisis, I mean for a long period, they did have a good base of oil revenues to invest in this kind of research. And I know of a couple of weapons systems that have not gotten a lot of attention, but they've been working on it.

They look great in men and grandmas. We are.

Aaron 55:04

Go ahead, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 55:06

We are so far away from ending on a positive note and we're heading in the other direction. Normally we end by talking about what we're reading. But David, plug your new project.

David 55:16

So I have a – well, I want to say two things. OK? First of all, in all the scariness and the time we're in now, I want everyone to keep in mind something that's actually a political fact but it bears on all of this. And that is that Russia changes. It's going to change again. Putin – For all the things he's done, he is the leader, but he's not all of the country.

And we should always keep in mind that we've made this mistake before. We focus on just the leader, Gorbachev, just the leader, Yeltsin or Putin. And we sort of forget there's a whole country of people there and they're going to have some say, maybe not as much as we would like. But the place changes and we shouldn't get so wrapped up in the status quo as, you know, a linear line to the future.

Secondly, I've got a book coming out in July about the Cold War. It has nothing to do with today, but it's about a nonfiction Cold War espionage story that took place in the early 1980s. And it's, I think, really revelatory about how espionage worked in that early period. And it's about a spy who stole a lot of secrets from the Soviet Union and delivered them to the United States.

Jeffrey 56:29

So we're being careful about this specific topic because I'm so excited for your book, David.

David 56:33

The book is called The Billion Dollar Spy. It will be out July 7th.

Jeffrey 56:38

It touches on something very near and dear to my heart. My reading recommendation is going to be a plug for David's other book, which I – well, not your other, but for The Dead Hand, another of David's books. I mentioned it at the beginning of the podcast, but it's still my absolute favorite thing to read on this subject.

Aaron? I would also say read The Dead Hand.

Aaron 57:03

But what I'm actually reading right now is a new book on the Islamic State called ISIS Inside the Army of Terror by Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss. It's quite good, easily to read and sobering. So check it out.

Jeffrey 57:14

Great. Hey, David, thank you so much. My pleasure. It was great.

Aaron 57:19

Thank you very much.

Jeffrey 57:20

And as always, thank you for listening. And if you like the podcast, leave us a positive review on iTunes. We'd really like it. Okay, bye-bye.