The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defence ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret.

The scary thing is that Perimeter still works today. At least according to Valery Yarynich, a former Soviet colonel now 72 years old. Yarynich should know, though: He worked 30 years at the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff helping to build it.

US Officials won’t even like to mention it, but with the Cold War over and Russia being more or less a friend, why risk having such a system in place? I really don’t like the idea of something going wrong in a rusty 25-year-old piece of Soviet-era technology.

Not when it can automatically launch a nuclear attack capable of taking out Humanity out of the map. [Wired]

It’s quite interesting, with well-thought-out logic that points to NK obtaining parts and knowledge from Russia. In short, they probably don’t have quite as good a capability for delivering the payload as previously thought. [The Bulletin]

According to Wikipedia, it depends. If they’re using the short to medium range missiles, it’s probably going to be the Musudan, which has an operational range of 2500-4000 kilometers. The darker red circle shows the maximum range of this. Nowhere close to US territories, but China, Russia and Japan should probably keep an eye open.

However, if they’re going to use their Taepodong-2 long range three-stage missiles, there’s a MAXIMUM possibility of 10,000 kilometers (the larger circle). However, a more likely scenario is somewhere around 4500 kilometers, which still isn’t quite far enough to hit Alaska or Hawaii.

In the case that somehow it can reach the maximum 10,000 kilometers, it’s still not quite there to the west coast of the US, so I can take my diapers off and stop worrying. [Guardian]

Poor Mr. Polar Bear. When he’s not jumping from melting ice chunk to ice chunk trying desperately not to drown, he’s avoiding the floating Russian nuclear power stations and their potential toxic waste.

You read that correctly, fellow Net denizens. Coming soon, Mr. Polar Bear and his brethren will be sharing real estate with a ring of floating, self-sustained nuclear power stations. It’s all part of Russia’s—and the world’s—ongoing thirst for energy.

Environmentalists are understandably outraged over the impact said stations could have on an already endangered area of the globe, and if polar bears could talk, I imagine they’d be outraged too.

Said a rep from Bellona, a Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, “[The plan] is highly risky. The risk of a nuclear accident on a floating power plant is increased. The plants’ potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern. If there is an accident, it would be impossible to handle.”

Oh, and there’s this fear that Russia will simply dump the radioactive waste into the Arctic Sea anyway, which they’ve done before on several occasions. To date at least 12 nuclear reactors from decommissioned Russian submarines have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid waste.

Pretty soon the ocean will be like a 24/7 aurora borealis up there. A wonderful, cancer-causing aurora borealis. [Guardian]

There are four or five airfields in Cuba with 4,000-meter-long runways, which absolutely suit us.

That’s what tovarishch Major General Anatoly Zhikharev—chief of staff of the Russian Air Force’s long-range aviation—told Russian news agency Interfax, adding that “if the two chiefs of state display such a political will, we are ready to fly there.”

So basically, the Russians are now at the dick-waving testing-the-new-guy stage. Add this to the Chinese plans to build carrier battlegroups and their recent harassment against a US Navy oceanographic ship in international waters, and you will have a pretty grim picture of what may be brewing. [Defense Tech]

[VideoRadar via Dark Roasted Blend]

Created by CarlosLabs, the Ground Zero Google Maps hack shows you the blast radius of different nuclear weapons, from Little Boy—the 15-kiloton uranium bomb that obliterated Hiroshima—and Fat Man—its 21-kiloton plutonium counterpart that did the same with Nagasaki—to the Tsar Bomba, the 50 megaton beast produced by the Soviet Union in the 60s.

Just search for your favourite or most hated city, select your weapon—or asteroid—click “Nuke It!” and see the reach of the destruction. I just wish it had the “whoomp” sound that you could hear in the movie every time a warhead impacted in the screens of Crystal Palace. [Ground Zero via BLDGBLOG]

3M’s Nuclear Grade Performance Plus Duct Tape is certified for low leachable halogens and sulfur and can handle temperatures up to 93-degrees Celcius. It’s also UV resistant for up to one year. A 600-yard roll runs around $US15. [3M via Toolmonger via Red Ferret]

A Royal Navy source told the Times:

It is remarkably difficult to detect a modern submarine with sonar and we work very hard with our own submarines, as do our allies, in making them as quiet as possible so they are not detectable.

And he’s serious about that—even after realising they’d hit something, the French crew couldn’t tell what it was. They wrote the object off as a shipping container, only to find out that they had actually collided with another submarine upon docking three days later, after the government had deduced the collision from routine information exchanges with the British.

The problem was that both submarines use passive sonar to map out their surroundings, which doesn’t give away their location with the ‘pings’ of active sonar, and is somewhat less sensitive. Without these ‘pings’, it was nearly impossible for either sub’s passive sonar to detect the other’s, leading to the collision and subsequent confusion.

In reality, the whole thing was a bit more subdued than initial reports (or our imaginations) led us to believe. The subs, which were travelling very slowly, just sort of bonked into on another, and the only critical damage to either vessel was to the French sub’s sonar system. [Times Online]

While I’m partial to Eastern European natural redheads lately, all these can start plenty of China Syndrome incidents. However, the rest of the participants must be there because they grew up next to Chernobyl. [Participants via Danger Room]

Marked NSFW because some of you complained. People, do you really live in the US or in Iran?