Its official name is “Perimetr” but many Soviet-era nuclear control officers called it “The Dead Hand.” David Hoffman’s book with that title won him a Pulitzer prize. Now you can imagine President Trump tweeting away over how Harper Lee should give him hers. And, now, you should stop – it’s horrifying. [openlibrary]

It appears certain that Stanley Kubrick heard something about PERIMETR and uploaded it into Doctor Strangelove. Hollywood, since then, has treated us to a number of movies that take on on various options about these sort of scenarios, and are often wrong. This posting may make you feel a bit better, in the current times – knowing that if President Trump loses his shit and orders a nuclear strike, it probably won’t happen. Or, if it does, it will represent a shared decision within the US military to use nuclear weapons, regardless of whether the president is compos mentis or not. “The Football” is nuclear theater, intended to provide a false sense of civil control over these massively destructive devices. In this posting, I will explain some of that. Your immediate reaction might be that I am lying, but I am not – as they say “do your own research” but more importantly “let’s think about this a bit.”

A good source for this is Schlosser’s “Command and Control” but also Richard Rhodes’ “The twilight of the bombs” and “The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan. Since Doctor Strangelove is a sort of fictional exploration of what a disaster regarding nuclear weapons might look like, it’s also a primary resource for this stuff. But what we need to understand is the more complicated stuff – when Kubrick was learning about Mount Weather, Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicles (MIRV) were being tested. The 70s inevitably turned into the 80s and we no longer had B-52s flying dangerous long-loops out of Thule Air Force Base (on Greenland) and there were MIRVs and cruise missiles, and – of course – ballistic missile submarines capable of single-handedly wiping out most of the human population of Earth. You are allowed to step back and take a deep breath and think about all this stuff about hypersonic missiles.

I’m going to tell you three things about hypersonic missiles, and then we’ll resume with the disaster.
1) Hypersonic missiles are very de-stabilizing weapons but fortunately the military field they are destabilizing is already unstable. So, uh, um.
2) Hypersonic missiles are absolutely cool as shit.
3) There is nothing magical about MACH-5 except that was Speed Racer’s car, and it’s an absurd speed. I will comment a bit about that aspect, eventually, but from a perspective about strategic technology, when the bombs arrive is more interesting than how but when we are having that argument, we are deep into the strategic region where mankind is most likely fucked.
The main value of speed is first strike.

If you are an Iain Banks fan, please join with me in thinking disdainfully this is all stupid. Imagine there is a nuclear war and archeologists are trying to figure out what happened. Sequencing the splat-marks will interest an archaeologist but not a strategist, because they know that they are likely to be boiled into the soup of their own creation, during the first two MACH-5 minutes. The point of all this is that, if someone starts a nuclear war, they will want to tilt the odds so that as many of their MACH-5 weapons or stealth weapons arrive on the enemy’s command/control sites, and known missile erection systems (think: those big trucks that carry around Oreshnik missiles). In that event, the US is going to more likely than not launch first, and will probably sever command/control systems via a process of vaporization. There is no place in that story for PERIMETR. Of course there is a place for a Russian first strike but there are a lot of complications about that; let’s maybe go into them if it still seems interesting.

One think we all need to understand is that hypersonic missiles have been around for a while. In fact, there is an absolutely absurd number of missiles on tap. We humans are very, very unwise.

There is also a huge number of various cruise missiles, many of which can be launched by submarines. Let me summarize roughly: if it’s worth putting into a submarine, it’s almost certainly stealthy and certainly carries a nuclear warhead. Cruise missiles are not “retaliatory” weapons, in the sense of Mutual Assured Destruction: they are stealthy first-strike weapons designed to be shot from close to their target so they arrive extremely quickly. There are threescenarios, none are good: 1) first pre-emptive strike on Russia, 2) pre-emptive strike into the middle of a Russian strike, 3) conventional strike first strike using stealth, speed, and precision, followed by negotiation from force.

I think I did a blog post about this a few years ago; the US strategy has not changed. A conventional first strike, backed up by stealthed nuclear assets like B1 lancers and B52s, would watch from very high up and if there was action after the first strike, nuclear weapons might be used because “take off and nuke it from orbit” is the only chance. I am fairly sure the US could win a conventional first-strike with follow-up threat; there is actually very small chance the Russians would care to do anything after that, especially when doing so would result in horrible destruction. Watch closely what I just sketched, MAD is dead and has failed; we have something else. Russia’s command/control and strategic assets (and population) are mostly in 5 or 6 concentrations within Russia. The US’ command/control and strategic assets are squirrelled away all around our allies’ countries. There are US nukes hidden all over the planet. A rapid stealth strike could depopulate Russia. A rapid stealth strike from Russia a) is unlikely to work but b) are they going to start nuclear wars with every country that has a US base in it? The US should have ended the cold war in the early 90s, based on that strategic calculus alone – but the US is politically divided within and does not think coldly. I’m happy about that, BTW. Russia has been afraid of letting its particularly naughty weapons out of direct control; which means that if the leaders of Russia have an authentic high explosive experience, their weapons’ systems’ control will go with them, individually.

There are the submarines, with the US (POLARIS) and cruise missiles, and the Russian subs which might well sink or blow up if someone tries to launch something strategically nasty from them. Thats based on Russian engineering and maintenance. But, worse, the Russian subs are loud clanky old things that are practically steampunk. They have something like 13 DELTA-class subs off the US coast, and three Borel-class. The US operates around 50 attack subs, Virginia class, Los Angeles class, and Seawolf class. It’s a safe bet that a US attack submarine is following each of the 16 Russian subs and if they start making sounds in the water like they are preparing to launch (as opposed to sounds like they are preparing to sink like Kursk did) they will be transitioned fairly quickly into preparing to sink. One of the worst aspects of that situation is that the poor commanders of the Russian subs know they are being stalked by much better gear, but they can’t tell if they are being stalked by how many of what until they hear a massive howl of fusillades of torpedoes bearing down on them. They’ll know their ships are so bad, that the Americans probably will not nuke them since they don’t have to. They will just disappear into the depths. If one of them makes it and starts readying to launch a ballistic missile, then they will – again – disappear into the depths, just … faster.

A number of features of “prompt global strike” are also acknowledgements that MAD is over. One of those is that some of the satellite systems are capable of detecting the “bulge” in the surface a submarine makes when it goes by. Isn’t that cool?! I mean it’s cool if you are American. Then there are some other things the US has flying around up there, which might be horrific bad news for Russian subs. Some of my friends who know more than I do, say that the space shuttle could look down through a lot of water, and see things. The X-37B can probably do some cool multi-spectrum stuff. Many armchair generals think the X-37B probably has some nukes on board. Well, I doubt that with 400 day mission times it has humans. A space-reentrant anti-submarine missile would definitely be “rocket science” but not prohibitive. Remember Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense system? [nationalinterest] Sure, if we have to, we will fling the entire kitchen sink including the locations of a small number of our Virginia and Los Angeles attack ships, and some information about what is on the X-37B.

Meanwhile, let’s talk about the point of this article: the football.

When you hear about it, it sounds like PERIMETR in a box. But, it’s not. Every since the US started PAL (Permissive action link) on warheads, and offered the technology to the Russians, the “football” can best be described as “a storage box for all the detonation confirmation for the missiles that have PALs.” We have PALs in various places, but they really aren’t that important, since we have moved away from MAD logic into a different space. The problem is that the Russians may have never built any PALs. The US built them in a few places but, in my opinion, the wrong ones. For example since the theoretical MAD framework still applies to ballistic missile subs, they are officially treated as retaliation weapons, in spite of the fact that they also carry stealth cruise missiles. But, since they exist under the MAD framework, there is a great rigamarole for unlocking the missiles and the warheads. [Red Tide was pretty fun, but…] The non-rigamarole version of all this is to look at the parts of the strategic system that require humans to operate. A Russian Oreshnik missile cannot drive itself out of its revetment, nor can it top erect its own missile container, balance its truck, etc., etc. Russian and US subs that are about to launch missiles have to have humans in the command center “level the boat” and prepare a large number of things for launch. Ballistic missile subs don’t have PALs because they cannot depend on getting the firing codes from a National Command Authority that has crashed into the side of Mount Weather. Then, you get down to “battlefield tactical weapons” that cannot be restrained because, something something someone might need to die – but the US MLRS battery commander, usually a Major, also may have control over a “special weapons truck” containing MLRS rockets with warheads basically similar to the MK-81 enhanced precision bomb. That Major can make the decision, independently, to launch. I know a guy who was in that job during Gulf War I. The US President can bash buttons on “the football” until he is satisfied but the MLRS are not remote-controlled, nor are they remote-operated, nor can they be launched without a pretty intense check-list being run through. A ballistic missile submarine captain has the same independence. There is a lot of rigamarole but it is almost as though the US Department of Military Rigamarole showed Doctor Strangelove to Dwight Eisenhower and he asked “can we do that?”

Back in the days of MAD, the Strategic Air Command commander was Curtis Le May. Basically, he felt his toys weren’t particularly over-aweing. So Le May figured out a strategy [discussed in Fred Kaplan] – the bombs in B-52s didn’t have PALs either, because they had to be dropped from a bomber and were triggered by altimeters. Cool. Le May realized he could just order a pre-emptive strike if Russia was looking threatening, and so the entire SAC was ready for years to just go light up the world when Le May said so. He had the same loyalty during the Korean War when Bomber Command bombed every single target in N Korea. Some 2 million people were killed, none of them by weapons with PALs on them.

If it came down to it, and the US was about to bomb somone, the football is rigamarole. Imagine the situation room, and they are about to bomb Iran’s refinement facilities with a penetration bomb, but some idiot starts asking where the football is. Stanley Kubrick would have loved it.

[Stanley Kubrick arranges a screening of Doctor Strangelove for Ike. Both men look serious and unhappy. Nano Banana AI and mjr]

So the good news is if the president goes nuts and launches a strike – it will go down mostly well, with no complaint from the brass in the War Room. Just like what happened when Trump bombed Iran because their uranium enrichment plants might be enriching the Epstein files. Oh, wait, that’s the bad news. The bad news is that US has built a tremendous military, in which the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is the punchline of a joke, and when the orders are given, of course everyone obeys them. That is the tragedy of this whole rigamarole.

Hey, you remember that idea where the government listens to its people, who tally their preferences and opinions? Did you ever vote for a single one of these civilization-destroyers? I wanted government-sponsored health care. What did you want? But look what you got.