In 1983 when US President Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the USSR took that as a sign that the United States intended a first strike advantage over them. In rapid response a system called Perimeter (formerly known as Dead Hand) was developed by 1985 to counter any such strike and beyond- even if all military commands had been destroyed and communications with aircraft and submarines had been lost. Perimeter works through a vast network of sensors placed around the FSU military defense sites with air samplers, radiation detectors, com line feeders,and seismic impact detectors. A central computer runs from a network and should all of these sensors be taken out in sequence or simultaneously the machine would take over command of all remaining strategic nuclear weapons for a massive counterattack and possibly a global assault. Surviving Russian humanity at that time would be cut out of the military loop entirely. Russia maintains that the system is stable and is incapable of an error that would trigger it due to the complex factors involved to initiate a response. Although the US has no plans for a first strike, in the event of a war with Russia space-based classified systems like ASTRA (for example) would become active and immediately shift the ionosphere over Russia, severing all communications and then fire on Russian sats (commanding US ASATs to do the same), blinding them strategically. Nukes could be fired at Russia from space. Whether this combo would trigger Perimeter is unknown...