

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.

Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is “yes” then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system. [...] We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s.

That quote was from the Times' review, and Slate's Ron Rosenbaum recently revisited the book within the chilling context of Russian president Vladimir Putin's decision to put his country's nuclear bomber fleet back in the air. (Are they actually armed? Only he knows!

Shiver.)

So what's this doing on a science blog? Well, it's Friday afternoon, my thoughts are meandering, and earlier I read a review of a God Delusion rebuttal. Wrote the reviewer,

... Dawkins’s first sleight of hand ... dishonestly bundles all religious belief and practice into one crude bag that supposedly equals fanaticism. This is rather like suggesting that all science is dangerous because it has brought nuclear weapons....

And that seems like a very valid point, both for being fair to religious people and for keeping our own belief in science from turning to ideological dogma. After all, if the world is nuked by a Cold War doomsday device because some Islamic fundamentalist group hits Russia with dirty bombs, it'll be a fetid mix of religious and secular madness that does us in, each happy to use the tools that scientists have provided.

The Return of the Doomsday Machine? [Slate]

Dr Strangelove and the real Doomsday machine [Times Online]

Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion [Times Online]