Did the Soviets really build a “doomsday machine”? – By Ron Rosenbaum – Slate Magazine
“This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984, during the height of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of creative engineering.” According to Blair, if Perimetr senses a nuclear explosion in Russian territory and then receives no communication from Moscow, it will assume the incapacity of human leadership in Moscow or elsewhere, and will then grant a single human being deep within the Kosvinsky mountains the authority and capability to launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal.
“Kosvinsky came online recently,” Blair wrote in 2003, “which could be one explanation for U.S. interest in a new nuclear bunker buster.”