Rocket that broadcasts the launch order
Rocket designer Mikhail Yangel takes charge of a new design bureau at Dnipropetrovsk, Yuzhnoye, which becomes one of the Soviet Union's two great missile houses. Decades later it will build the command missile at the heart of the Perimeter system.
A Soviet surface-to-air missile downs Francis Gary Powers's U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, wrecking the Paris summit and hardening the Cold War. Signals intelligence, not overflight, becomes the safer way to watch the adversary.
For thirteen days the United States and the USSR stand at the edge of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. The crisis, resolved on 28 October, drives both sides to build survivable command systems, the strategic anxiety behind the Perimeter myth that later attaches to the Buzzer.
Kuzminsky becomes chief engineer of NIIDAR, the institute for long-distance radio communications, and turns to the problem of seeing beyond the horizon, detecting a missile launch by the radar echo bounced off the ionosphere.
Yangel dies of a heart attack on his sixtieth birthday. The bureau he founded goes on to design the 15A11 command rocket, the 'dead hand' missile that would broadcast the order to fire.
Nixon and Brezhnev sign the first strategic-arms-limitation agreements in Moscow, capping missile numbers and restricting missile defence. Arms control does not touch the shortwave command networks below it.
A Soviet government decree orders the development of Perimeter, a system to guarantee nuclear retaliation even if the leadership is destroyed. Its most concrete component is a command missile that would fly over the country broadcasting launch orders by radio, a real 'dead hand', though not the one the Buzzer myth imagines.
A second Duga radar is built near Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Soviet Far East, aimed across the Pacific to cover the blind spots of the western system. Two vast arrays now watch the sky for the flare of a missile launch.
The Yuzhnoye bureau's command missile, a rocket carrying a radio transmitter instead of a warhead, makes its first successful flight test at Baikonur. Over seven launches the concept is proven: a missile that shouts the order to fire to every silo still standing.
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, on duty at a Soviet early-warning centre, decides that a satellite report of incoming American missiles is a malfunction and does not pass it up the chain. He is right. The episode shows how thin the human margin was in the systems the Buzzer's myth invokes.
Colonel Valery Yarynich, a career Strategic Rocket Forces officer, rises to deputy head of missile-weapons command as the Perimeter retaliation system is finalised. He knows how it actually works, the sensors, the logic, the command missile.
Reagan and Gorbachev come startlingly close to abolishing all nuclear weapons before the talks collapse over missile defence. The thaw that follows will end Soviet jamming for good.
Reagan and Gorbachev eliminate an entire class of intermediate-range missiles. Glasnost is loosening Soviet control of information; the jamming transmitters are about to fall silent.