The Soviets Built a Doomsday Machine. It’s Still Working. | Hacker News Reader

The Soviets Built a Doomsday Machine. It’s Still Working.

wired.com

50 pointsrobg7 comments

It's not a machine per se. It is basically a system that grants launch privileges to the personnel at the launch site under certain conditions that almost certainly indicate a nuclear attack against the rest of the military infrastructure. To launch or not to launch is still a decision made by a human.

The fact that you say "almost certainly indicate a nuclear attack" is not terribly reassuring. Depending on whether the result of the analysis the system performs is correct or not, "doomsday" could be short for either "exact revenge on doomsday" or "cause doomsday" :P

Apparently on the US side, the SAC commander would receive a phone call that a nuclear attack was under way, and he would be given 2-3 minutes to decide if the warning was valid (all warnings turned out to be false in hindsight, obviously). I'm not sure I like that system a whole lot better.

Edit: Also see Stanislav Petrov, who correctly identified an attack warning as false: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Ok, this was interesting, but he only dealt with the "they built it" half of the title. I wanted to know more about the "It's Still Working" half. Who is controlling this system now that the Soviet Union is no more? Who is maintaining the components, and their interconnects? Is there any reason not to tear it down and, if not, why hasn't it been?

One of the reasons to have the machine is actually to prevent Russian hot-headed generals from pushing the "launch" button too quickly. That is why the existence of the machine wasn't really made known to the West. It makes perfect sense to still keep it online. Perhaps, because it is online, we haven't seen WWIII yet.

> Who is controlling this system now that the Soviet Union is no more? I would guess a branch of FSB or FAPSI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAPSI).

> Is there any reason not to tear it down and, if not, why hasn't it been? They will, as soon US will tear their systems down.

More discussion in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836952

Wow, this is another of those ingenious inventions which result from the fact that a system realizes: I can and will fail, and if this happens, bad things happen. and thus, they built a gigantic doomsday "machine", which then lowers the probability of such a failure. Such systems always make me happy :)

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