Russia revives its nuclear armageddon project, Dead Hand

The Story

A Sunday Times investigation reveals that Russia is reviving Facility 1335, a Cold War-era nuclear command bunker located deep within the Ural

Key takeaways

• Facility 1335 is being upgraded with enough steel to build three Eiffel Towers and over 50,000 tons of concrete.
• The facility is part of the 'Perimeter' or 'Dead Hand' system designed for automated nuclear retaliation.

Main topics

• Facility 1335
• Dead Hand/Perimeter system

Notable quotes

Russia is thinking in the way it used to.

Conclusion

The investigation highlights a significant escalation in Russian nucle

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) U.S. voters abroad, have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click Request My Ballot. Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Speaker 5 (0:25) How do we truly navigate life's hardest moments? I'm Julia Samuel, psychotherapist and best-selling author. In my podcast, Therapy Works, I open the therapy room for candid, insightful conversations with people known and unknown. Discover what my guests have learnt and failed to learn about resilience and human connection. Listen to Therapy Works today, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:59) From The Times and The Sunday Times, this is The Story. I'm Luke Jones. Speaker 4 (1:10) Deep in the Ural Mountains, which is this vast territory that is north of Kazakhstan in the heartland of Russia, lies a mountain which is called Kovinsti Kamen. Speaker 2 (1:25) My colleague John Mooney, Sunday Times investigations editor in Ireland, has been sniffing around something rather troubling deep inside this mountain. Speaker 4 (1:35) It is the very essence... of the Russian wilderness. There are tiny human settlements dotted around this region, but there's one road in, there's one road out. Speaker 4 (1:51) And then there's a military garrison that's located at the foot of this mountain. They are there with one purpose, which is to protect a secret facility very deep within that mountain. Speaker 2 (2:04) It's called, rather opaquely, Facility 1335, and is a Cold War-era bunker built by the Soviets to withstand a nuclear attack. Speaker 4 (2:15) So if you were to gain access into... the military facility. You will also see that facing into the mountain are what looks like entrances that go into the mountain. These are green, there are steel shutters on the front of them and they're heavily guarded. They're big structures, big enough that you could drive a truck inside and once you get inside that initial gate It's a tunnel that goes on and on and on. We believe for about two and a half kilometers right down underground into the heart of that mountain. Speaker 2 (2:57) It was assumed this base was mothballed after the Cold War, but John and a team of investigative journalists have uncovered images, satellite pictures, details and documents that show it's actually been revived and upgraded into a giant underground command centre, one which could lead to Russian retaliation in case of a nuclear attack. Which begs the question, why is President Putin preparing for a nuclear attack? Speaker 2 (3:33) The story today, Russia's Armageddon bunker revealed. Speaker 4 (3:48) The Sunday Times has for a long time been documenting the activities of Russian military and Russia's intelligence services. And in recent years, we've built a formidable reputation for investigating this. And in doing so, we have forged alliances with lots of people who are involved in quite serious and insightful investigations into malign activities of the Kremlin. So a number of researchers who were already involved in trying to work out and monitor what was happening at this particular location at facility 1335 approached me and asked would we like to get involved. I suppose the investigation was born from that and indeed our colleagues in the dossier centre and in Danmatch, who are an investigative agency based in Copenhagen, we've done a significant amount of work on this and working out exactly what was going on. Speaker 2 (4:56) And the origins of this go right back to the Cold War, don't they? Should we start there? Speaker 4 (5:01) Of Speaker 2 (5:01) course. Speaker 4 (5:01) So the activities that have been documented are really the product or the children of the Cold War and that type of thinking. So during the Cold War, the Soviet leadership was always obsessed with the possibility of a decapitation strike by some powerful entity in the West. they always were preparing for a kind of doomsday scenario where something would happen and they would be not able to defend the motherland or Soviet Russia as it was. So the thinking was that they wanted to build a facility that in the event of a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia... that if the leadership was, you know, killed or incapacitated, that there would be a facility capable of carrying out a retaliatory strike. And this is what Facility 1335 is. And Speaker 2 (5:58) just so we're clear, if we zoom out, Facility 1335 is one of these bunkers, one of these facilities, but it sits within a larger project. Speaker 4 (6:09) So the Soviet solution to the threat posed by the West was to create a system called Perimeter, which was known as a dead hand to Western intelligence services. And Perimeter was almost like a communication or command structure that would be able to organize a nuclear strike in retaliation if Russia was to suffer a nuclear attack. So there were silos right across Russia that were... designed to hold weapons that could be fired if such circumstances were to arise. Facility 1335 is not a launch site or anything like that. What it is, is a command center that was capable of communicating with all these other secret bases that were dotted around communist Russia. And if something happened, they would be able to mount a strike back. It was central to the Dead Hand system because it gave the instructions. It was capable of relaying the command. There's always been a debate whether this was a fully automated system or whether it required human instructions and involvement. But I think it is suffice to say that it had the capability of... transmitting messages to various military facilities across Soviet Russia that would be capable of carrying out a retaliatory strike. Speaker 2 (7:33) And we should say this wasn't uniquely Soviet. The US had similar plans for their side of things. Speaker 4 (7:39) Exactly. I think what was slightly different about this was there was always a sense that this could be automated. So... It all goes back to this concept of mutually assured destruction. And of course, Russia being Russia, which they have an Orwellian approach to security and military affairs, whereby they escalate to de-escalate. So of course, this is very much suggested that this was automated. So if there was ever any consideration being given to a decapitation strike of the Soviet command, that a strike back could Speaker 2 (8:17) occur Speaker 4 (8:17) regardless. At Speaker 2 (8:21) the time of the Cold War, when Facility 1335, as part of this dead hand or perimeter system, was