Too many people have forgotten the true danger of nuclear weapons. It is not that terrorists will (yes, will - no matter how we struggle against it, someone, sometime will get the materials or a preassembled bomb) flatten a city. No, the truly terrible thing is that we are never more than thirty minutes away from the end of modern northern-hemisphere civilization.

I'm a little over thirty years old, which is old enough to remember going to sleep at night genuinely, legitimately worried that you might not wake up... because of that five-megaton airburst above a known target ten miles up the road. Having done some study of this subject in my college years, I understand the multiple erroneous assumptions about nuclear war in the 80's that that statement embodies... but if the flag had gone up, I still would have been immediately downwind and while I undoubtedly would have woken up, I would have been dead within 48 hours And while people would survive in the US and Soviet Union, anything more (or even perceived to be more, and how much can be accurately perceived in that ten minute decision-making period leaders would have before the missiles started landing can not be determined... except by actually trying it) than a pure counter-force launch by either side would permanently leave both nations crippled, the majority of their populations dead or walking-dead.

When the Iron Curtain rusted apart, we celebrated, but not because we really gave much of a damn if the Czechs could elect a poet or the Germans could run Oktoberfest without that pesky wall through the middle. We cheered because we knew that something resembling a democratic government in Russia was much less likely to engage in global military chest-thumping which might trigger nuclear escalation. We could go to bed at night, not half-expecting the nuclear alarm-clock to wake us up.

Today I am... not really worried in the same way I was in my youth, but I can see the possibilities out there. If Russia under Yeltsin resembled a democratic government, Russia under Putin these days resembles a Soviet-style government-by-bureaucracy pretending (very badly) to resemble a democracy. It's not quite alarming yet, and if Putin really steps down as his second term ends there's a chance that the next leader will have the wisdom to step back, to build something better than the kleptocracy that Russia has become... and maybe Dubya will withdraw from Iraq before his second term ends.

Yeah, right.

Even a non-democratic Russia need not be our enemy, but it could become one in a real hurry, and my fear is that the utter inefficiencies in their joke of an economy will leave them permanently poor and resentful...and sitting on a legacy of nuclear weapons from the "glory years" of the previous era. The one positive is at least they lack the conventional military power to project enough force to make direct confrontation an inevitability. Soviet conventional strategy always emphasized quantity, but back in the day they were seldom more than a decade behind in technological terms. The Russian military today is a joke with a lot of badly-trained manpower and no credible way it can attack anyone (except with its nukes) who's not a next-door neighbor. Unless they try conquering Ukraine or Estonia or something (and they can't - Europe could stop them, even without our help) our forces and theirs simply will never butt heads.

If we're not shooting at them or their immediate proxies, the Russians will never have adequate reason to push the button. Even the proverbial gung-ho military commander under the mountain with all of Russia's nuclear might at his fingertip will not be inclined to punish the US if it was the Chechens who did Moscow.

I said I was worried, and I am, but it's by a couple of extreme scenarios of which there are no signs of near-term emergence.

The first and more realistic one is the development of a Nazi-like expansionist, fascist culture in Russia. The details of whatever ideology would underly this are irrelevant, but a charismatic leader with dreams of reconquering the Soviet empire and enough popular support to stamp out the corruption crippling the economy and the patience to remake the military into a real weapon could turn Russia into a threat which would make the old communist manifest destiny look like my teddy bear.

...and yes, that's a silly nightmare scenario, except that most of the ingredients for it are already in place. Russia is becoming a single-party state again, and the opposition is almost criminalized. Putin and company have centralized control of much of the media, limiting the voices that much of the country hears. Russia lost its last great war (the cold war), and while it is a stretch to say the nation resents that fact there is a detectable and explotable (I would argue already exploited) inferiority complex in play. And despite the repression and crushing of democratic reform, Putin and his government remain immensely popular.

Still, in this worst case a truly hostile Russia is at least a decade away, and everything has to go wrong. Disturbing trends, but I'm not losing sleep.

The second scenario that worries me is perhaps best defined as "mistaken launch on incomplete information". That has an easy sound to it: something bad happens, and because the person under the mountain doesn't know all the context, the button gets pushed. But in the real world, it's not nearly that simple - the person under the mountain is one of the very-best informed persons in the world. He has to be, since the fate of his nation (the world doesn't matter here, just the nation) rests under his finger and no nation is going to give that power to a blind man. Furthermore, pressing that button is tantamount to personal suicide - a mountain is not adequate protection against repeated megaton-level ground penetrator strikes, it just means you get to watch the end of the world a little longer than most - so that person has to be motivated enough to do it, and a "maybe" is not very motivating.

The real danger here is someone being thrust into that position with incomplete knowledge of things that are already underway. There was a decent novel on this premise written in the mid-90's named Arc Light, which supposed a Russian coup in the middle of a Russia-China war that was just starting to go nuclear... and some other messy circumstances which would take too long to explain. But the general idea of someone coming into power and mistaking the signs of a nuclear attack is possible... just horribly, horribly unlikely in terms of timing. Coups don't happen that often (though the structures of government Russia is developing make a coup more likely) and "signs of nuclear war" are both pretty damned distinct and even more unlikely. This is the sort of thing that makes transparency and international review of command and control structures desirable, even at such a low probability.

Not something to keep you awake into the night, unless you go see a scary movie based on it.

That said, I do worry for the long term. Terrorist nukes are not going to be able to wipe out a nation. (Okay, Lichtenstein. But that's a bad joke.) But a large nuclear exchange between nations will always be a possibility as long as technological civilization exists, and it behooves all of us to educate ourselves on the issues, armaments, and scenarios involved with threats of that scale. I don't believe that total disarmament will ever occur - the incentives for keeping a nuclear inventory are simply too great.

Remember, this technology will be with us forever. Or until it kills us. I hope that it has your attention.

...all that said (and boy did I say more than I intended), I'm less than impressed by the "doomsday machine" this article is talking about. As best as I can parse, this is not a Strangelovian super-cobalt-salted bomb somewhere in Russia (which itself doesn't quite pass the smell test under my (better-than-average but admittedly limited) understanding of the possibilities of nuclear armaments) but just a fallback launch/PAL system.with strong automatic components. I will search out some of the references here - as my main argument stated, we need to know what's out there. But something that's not fully automatic just doesn't scare me, for reasons treated above. Just another over-sensational headline. Been a lot of those around here lately.

-Ked