Valery Yarynich

Colonel Valery Yarynich, a career Strategic Rocket Forces officer, is serving as a command-and-control specialist in the Strategic Rocket Forces as the Perimeter retaliation system is finalised. He knows how it actually works, the sensors, the logic, the command missile.

From 1993 key details of Perimeter become public through the American nuclear-security expert Bruce Blair, and Yarynich begins to speak about the system openly, later also to journalists and historians. Almost everything the outside world reliably knows about the 'Dead Hand' traces back to him.

Yarynich publishes 'C3: Nuclear Command, Control, Cooperation', arguing for transparency between the nuclear powers about their command systems, the opposite of the secrecy that breeds myths like the one attached to the Buzzer.

Journalist Nicholas Thompson publishes a Wired feature revealing the Perimeter system to a mass American audience, drawing on Yarynich. The article cements 'Dead Hand' in popular imagination.

Yarynich dies in a Moscow hospital, mourned by the arms-control community as the man who lifted the lid on the most secret machine of the Cold War, and who insisted the real dead hand was frightening enough without embellishment.

In his final years Yarynich campaigns against the very automation he helped build, warning that a machine with a finger near the nuclear trigger is more danger than deterrent. His warnings went unheeded but are on the record.