Known in the West as Dead Hand and officially designated Perimeter, this Cold War system was built by the Soviet Union to guarantee a retaliatory nuclear strike even if the entire leadership was wiped out in a surprise first strike. This deep dive traces why it was built, walking through the 1980s shift from bombers and early ICBMs, which gave commanders roughly 30 minutes of warning, to accurate submarine-launched Trident missiles that cut that window to under three minutes and made a decapitation strike a real threat.

We break down the anatomy of the system: sensor networks watching for the seismic signature of a surface burst, the distinctive double flash of a nuclear detonation, radiation spikes and dropped communications; the command rocket carrying a radio warhead that broadcasts launch orders from above an EMP-fried landscape; and th ...