New York: Russia has a computerized system that can automatically fire its nuclear arsenal in wartime if military commanders are dead or unable to direct the battle, says a leading American expert on the Russian military.

The Russians call it the “dead hand,” according to the expert, who personally characterizes it as a doomsday machine. If the system exists and some American intelligence analysts say it is unlikely but possible it would mark the first time in the nuclear era that a machine has been readied to press the button.

The expert, Bruce Blair, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, has conducted scores of lengthy interviews in recent years with officers in charge of the Russian arsenal and its ancillary gear. He says they eventually told him of the system.

Reactions among experts range from belief to skepticism. Some American intelligence officials doubt the report’s veracity, saying it is unsupported by available evidence.

But other experts say that Blair’s Stature and Russian access give it credibility and that federal officials might be downplaying what could be an intelligence failure. Robert Gates, CIA director during the Bush administration, said the dead hand is conceivable in light of other recent surprises about Russia and its military machinery, David Christian, a spokesman for the CIA, declined to comment, as did the Pentagon. Russian officials could not be reached for comment in Moscow.

Blair says the Russian system is designed to be switched on by military commanders in a crisis, and in theory would initiate action only if its sensors detected a nuclear attack on Moscow,

He says the system works with litde or no human oversight, can send coded messages over thousands of miles to military forces and can launch nuclear armed missiles with no human assistance, Blair adds that it is, by nature, prone to error.

The system would seem to bring to life one of the darkest fears of the nuclear era—that machines could instigate nuclear holocaust, a idea satirized in the movie “Dr. Strangelove.”

All nations that prepare for nuclear war have elaborate systems of early warning sensors and computers that can and do make mistakes. False alerts in practice are fairly common but are roulinely disregarded as human beings sift through evidence to see whether a real nuclear attack is under way.

Blair says the automated nature of the Russian system makes it inherently dangerous. Moreover, he says, Russia’s early warning system is now limping after the fall of the Soviet empire, increasing the risk of a mechanical misstep.

Blair is a respected scholar on military command and control who has written extensively on the subject, most recently “The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War,” a Brookings book published in March,

He joined the Air Force in 1970 and was a launch control officer for Minuteman intercontinental missiles between 1972 and 1974. He has worked in Washington since 1987 for the Brookings Institution, and before that for the congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Department of Defense, where he analyzed systems for controlling nuclear arms.

(Coursey New York Times)

Article extracted from this publication >>  November 5, 1993