Russia just switched its doomsday nuclear system back on
4 days ago · 27 September 2026Share
Perimeter Institute.СССР · CC BY-SA 2.5 ca
Russia just brought back its doomsday machine.
A new investigation says Russia has rebuilt and switched on a Cold War system built for one job. Fire back with nuclear weapons even if Russia's own leaders are dead.
The Sunday Times, Danwatch and the Dossier Center published it a day ago.
The system is called Perimetr. The West has a blunter name for it. Dead Hand.
Here's how it works. If a nuclear attack kills Russia's leadership and wipes out its normal chain of command, an underground bunker still sends the order to launch. Nobody has to be alive to give it.
That bunker is real. It's called Object 1335, and it's buried inside a mountain called Kosvinsky Kamen, in the Urals. It sits near a small village. Outlets spell it two ways, Kytlym or Kitim. Same place. Soldiers guard the entrance from a machine gun tower.
So how do we know it's back?
The investigators went through nearly two and a half million Russian procurement documents. They checked satellite images. They talked to named nuclear experts, former Russian officers, and a US official who used to run America's own nuclear stockpile.
And the paperwork tells a story.
Big construction work at the site started in 2018. A retired Russian general, V.G. Khalin, helped build the original system in the 1970s and led its upgrade between 2005 and 2010. He's written that Perimetr's automation has been improved. Mobile command posts. Space-based communications.
Another source, a Russian colonel named Y. Andreyev, says Object 1335 went into full combat duty in 2023.
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On April 28, 2016, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a true-color image of a spring day across northwestern Russia. File photo. Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC · Public domain
Now the numbers. At least 22,000 tonnes of steel went into this site. That's about the weight of three Eiffel Towers. Add 600 kilometres of electrical cable. Add roughly 56,500 tonnes of cement. Satellite pictures show fresh digging and new roads cut around the mountain. People who used to work there say the tunnels are so big that buses drive staff between sections.
So what does switching this back on actually mean?
Pavel Podvig runs the Russian Nuclear Forces Project. He told The Sunday Times this isn't really a weapon. He says quote "Perimeter is actually a communication system". Its whole job, he says, is making sure a retaliation order can still get out after an attack.
That's one reading. Insurance, not aggression.
Other experts don't read it that calmly. Jeffrey Lewis, who teaches nuclear disarmament at the Middlebury Institute, told the investigators the simple explanation is that Russia is putting Dead Hand back to work. Andy Weber ran the Pentagon's nuclear and biological defence programmes under Barack Obama. He says he has no reason to think Russia hasn't reactivated it.
But not everyone sees a threat pointed outward. Tom Røseth studies Russian security at the Norwegian Staff College. He told the investigators this looks more like a defensive upgrade, hardening the bunker against American bunker-buster bombs, than getting ready to strike first.
The Kremlin has said nothing. Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin's press secretary, didn't answer the investigators at all.
And this isn't the first time this system has come up during the war. About a year ago, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's former president, mentioned Perimetr in a Telegram post aimed straight at Donald Trump. Donald Trump responded by saying he was moving American nuclear submarines.
So what don't we know?
How the system is actually run today is still classified. Nobody has said whether NATO or any Western government has confirmed any of this independently. Some documents reportedly describe at least 24 underground chambers and a gap of 2.5 kilometres between the main exit and the emergency one, but that detail comes from The Sunday Times alone, and it couldn't be checked anywhere else.
Here's what three outlets, working from the same documents, do agree on. The bunker built in the Cold War to guarantee Russia could still fire back after being wiped out has been rebuilt. And by 2023, it was switched back on.
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