PD Smith

On 13 November 1984, a Soviet missile was launched from Kapustin Yar, east of Stalingrad. About forty minutes later an R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile blasted off from an underground silo in Kazakhstan. Known to Western intelligence experts as the SS-18 Satan missile, it was capable of carrying either a single 24-megaton warhead or eight independently targeted 600-kiloton warheads. The bomb that killed some 200,000 people at Hiroshima was just 12 kilotons.

The launch was monitored by the West’s spy satellites. But it was an unexceptional moment in the history of the arms race and soon forgotten. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached, and the ice of the cold war began to thaw, did military analysts realize the significance of these otherwise unexceptional rocket launches. They were the first operational test of what the Western press later described as ‘Russia’s doomsday machine’.

In my book Doomsday Men, I showed how popular culture played a vital role in inspiring the dream of the superweapon, a dream that in the nuclear age turned into the nightmare of mutually assured destruction, or MAD.

More than any other weapon, it was Leo Szilard’s chilling notion of the cobalt bomb (first described on American radio in 1950) that came to symbolize the threat of global nuclear destruction. The C-bomb consisted of one or more massive hydrogen bombs jacketed with cobalt. It was the ultimate weapon, a doomsday device which could spread radioactive fallout across the entire planet.

As throughout the history of superweapons, fiction and film played a key role in exploring the horrific implications of the C-bomb and how it could be used to create a doomsday machine, most famously in Peter George’s best-selling thriller Red Alert (1958) and Stanley Kubrick’s cold-war classic (based on George’s novel) Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

As Ambassador DeSadeski explains in Dr Strangelove: ‘If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety-three years!’

Twenty years after Kubrick’s film depicted the world being destroyed by a Soviet doomsday machine, the real one became operational. Nicknamed by its commanders ‘The Dead Hand’, it was a sophisticated system of sensors, communication networks and command bunkers, reinforced to withstand nuclear strikes. At its heart was a computer. As soon as the Soviet leadership detected possible incoming missiles, it activated the system, known by its code name ‘Perimetr’. Part of the secret codes needed to launch a Soviet nuclear strike were released and the computerized process set in motion. Then, like a spider at the centre of its web, the computer would watch and wait for evidence of an attack.

As I said in my book, the way it worked was strikingly similar to the doomsday machine described by Dr Strangelove. He explained that the computer was ‘linked to a vast interlocking network of data-input sensors which are stationed throughout the country and orbited in satellites. These sensors monitor heat, ground shock, sound, atmospheric pressure and radioactivity.’

Much about the Dead Hand system is still shrouded in secrecy. Russian arms expert Bruce Blair revealed the first details in 1993. Recently declassified interviews with former Soviet officials have cast fresh light on the system. They show that there were doubts about its reliability. Some even questioned whether it was ever fully deployed. However, these interviews also reveal the shocking possibility that the Dead Hand system may have been fully automatic.

Previously it was thought that once the computer detected signs of an attack, it required human approval before any counter attack could be launched. A Soviet officer buried deep underground in a command post would have had the unenviable task of authorising the Dead Hand to complete its lethal task. But these interviews raise the possibility that the Dead Hand had eliminated the need for any human control. It may be that the Dead Hand could launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal as soon as its sensors indicated that an attack had occurred. That idea is truly terrifying.

A machine would be responsible for unleashing nuclear weapons with a total destructive power as much as 50,000 times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Even without Szilard's C-bomb, who knows what would be left alive after such a nuclear holocaust.

Intriguingly, Nicholas Thompson, writing in Wired today, argues that Perimetr was actually designed ‘to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis’. In other words, it was an insurance policy meant to reassure the Kremlin’s hawks that their country could hit back, even after a sneak attack by submarine launched missiles, which would have given the Soviet leadership barely thirteen minutes advance warning of a devastating attack.

As far as anyone knows, the Dead Hand remains operational. What is truly worrying, even today, is the secrecy that continues to surround the whole subject. Thompson has found that neither George Schultz nor former CIA director James Woolsey had heard of the Dead Hand system. Former Soviet era officials will still not discuss it. One who dared to talk died in mysterious circumstances. Such secrecy is, as Dr Strangelove realised, disastrous: ‘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?’

The doomsday machine is supposed to be the ultimate deterrent. But if no one knows that the deterrent exists... Well, you've all seen the final scenes of Dr Strangelove.

The Guardian has just published my review of Russell G Foster and Leon Kreitzman's fascinating new book, Seasons of Life: The Biological Rhythms that Living Things Need to Thrive and Survive. Their first book, Rhythms of Life (2004) - which I reviewed for the Independent - explored the science of the circadian clock (circa, about; dies, day) and explained how cells and "clock" genes form a molecular metronome inside us that synchronises body-time with world-time across 24 hours.

Their new book shows that, as well as a 24-hour clock, organisms contain a circannual clock with a periodicity of a year. These two studies provide a remarkable glimpse into the working of nature's inbuilt timing mechanisms. You can read my review of Seasons of Life here.

Clare Dudman has interviewed me for her excellent literary blog Keeper of the Snails.

Unfortunately, I had to admit that I have no connection whatsoever with snails. I don't even eat them. She took it well though.

You can read the interview here.

Clare Dudman, author of Wegener's Jigsaw and 98 Reasons for Being, has written a wonderful piece on my book Doomsday Men for her blog, Keeper of the Snails. Here's an extract:

"I suppose the story of the Doomsday Men has been a constant background to my life. Most of the time I have successfully pushed it to the back of my mind because it seemed too frightening and too impossible to be true. But reading the Doomsday Men has forced me to confront it and understand. Recently the threat of weapons of mass destruction has been overshadowed by natural plagues, global warming and economic crisis, but it is still there. It can still happen."

You can read the rest here and also watch Peter Watkins's The War Game (1965) .

You may not have noticed, but our cities are changing. As Anna Minton shows in her excellent new study, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-century City, the development of Canary Wharf in the 1990s blazed a trail that is now being followed in cities across the UK, creating privatized, personality-free zones stripped of any historical or cultural uniqueness. These hi-tech “defensible spaces” are promoted as being “clean and safe”. But they are also sterile and soulless. Pat, a hairdresser who has lived on the Isle of Dogs for 37 years, says of Canary Wharf today: “I don’t like going there. It always gives me the fear.”

Sections of our city centres are being sold off to private developers to create shopping monocultures such as Westfield London or "malls without walls" like Stratford City, which is being built for the 2012 Olympics and is one of the largest retail-led developments in Europe. It is, says Minton, "a private city within a city" and represents a return to the early 19th century when aristocrats owned great swathes of London, fortifying their estates of up-market housing with gates and private security forces.

Now, “land and property which has been in public hands for 150 years or more is moving back into private hands”. Minton argues that today’s privatised city centres and gated communities are fostering "a new culture of authoritarianism and control". Private security guards watch and record our every move with CCTV: the UK now has more surveillance cameras than the rest of Europe combined. The small city of Coventry will soon have 700. At Stratford City they intend to use unmanned aerial drones to watch the streets. In these privatized zones, security guards routinely move on beggars and the homeless, and they can even ban groups of young people and prevent the taking of photographs.

Our modern houses and streets may be "secured by design" (to quote the jargon), but Minton’s compelling argument is that "we are making the city a far more fearful place". The obsession with security and the privatisation of public space is also “a challenge to a type of public life, public culture and democracy in British cities” that has existed since at least the nineteenth century. Instead of local councils "owning" the city for us, now our streets and buildings (for example, Manchester’s Free Trade Hall) are being bought by investors. According to Minton, “today the ‘public good’ is what makes the most money”. It is government policy to sell off local authority assets worth £30 billion by 2010. The manager of one “Business Improvement District” controlling a city centre tells her: “Bugger democracy. Customer focus is not democratic.”

Clearly, it is important that cities should have vibrant economies. But in Britain the pursuit of profit threatens to undermine the quality of urban life. Minton’s book is a powerful indictment of urban planning in the UK under both Conservative and New Labour governments. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about how our cities will feel and function in the future.