That cold-war satire wasn’t so far off. According to a top U.S. analyst, Russia does have such a doomsday device–known as Dead Hand–that can launch its nuclear missiles even if military commanders are dead or incapacitated. Describing the system in The New York Times last week, Bruce G. Blair of the Brookings Institution said that Russian leaders must activate it by sending a coded message to a radio station in the town of Chekhov, south of Moscow. Then the system is on its own: if Dead Hand detects a nuclear attack and if communications links to the Kremlin are broken, it automatically signals emergency rockets to broadcast launch orders to missiles, bombers and subs.
The CIA and the Pentagon refused to comment, and some outside analysts were dubious. But the United States has long had its own, less technical, version: some U.S. commanders can fire their missiles independently in case of a nuclear attack. Blair, who says he learned of Dead Hand in interviews with Russian officials, argues that both systems should be dismantled: “Arms negotiations are all well and good, but the higher priority is to eliminate the hair trigger on those arms that remain.” With the armed forces of the former Soviet Union in tatters, the dangers have only grown.
