Dr. Strangelove alive and well

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPag... WIRED MAGAZINE: 17.10 Politics : Security RSS Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine By Nicholas Thompson Email 17 hours ago The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, Dead Hand. Illustration: Ryan Kelly Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009bthe Berlin Wall came down two decades agobbut the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly. "The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again. Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday deviceba real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid C