Doomsday Bomb : Osterhagen : Dead Hand
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With the new doomsday 2012 movie coming out this week, I got to thinking. Was watching "Outbreak" a few weeks ago on A&E where a deadly diseases spreads throughout a small town. Much like most zombie movies, the call comes to bomb the quarantined town and prevent the disease from spreading. Made me wonder, not so much if it were a small town, but a large proportion of our country, could we nuke ourselves? Could we sacrifice ourselves so others might live? I'd like to think so. Sacrifice is the greatest lesson a human can learn in my opinion. Technically, in a lot of peoples.
So this got me thinking about the Osterhagen Key, that fictitious switch in that little known Sci-Fi show none of us are familiar with that purportedly detonates the worlds nuclear arsenal which has been strategically placed beneath the earths crust to prevent human suffering if the need ever arose.
Something like that could never exist in real life, could it?
Enter "Dead Hand" (Система Периметр) aka the "Hand from Coffin" a real life cold war Osterhagen Doomsday bomb that provides nuclear detonation in the event Russia is attacked and everyone is dead. Think like that episode of Lost where the guy is sitting in the room and has to hit the button every so often or the world blows up. That kind of crap. You would think since it's not the cold war anymore, that someone might have carefully, and cautiously disarmed it... It has not. It's active and waiting to deliver it's doomsday.
An article in Wired Magazine from September 2009 indicates that not only does Dead Hand still exist, but that it is also ready to react as intended. The article goes on to state that Dead Hand still receives system upgrades. cite
...and of course, if Russia has one... I'm betting we do too.
