An independent investigation has revealed that Russia has secretly revived its Cold War nuclear doomsday programme inside a vast underground bunker built into a remote mountain in the Urals, designed to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes even if the country’s entire leadership is destroyed.
Source:
The Sunday Times, Danish media group Danwatch and the Dossier Center.
What the Investigation Reveals
The joint investigation, drawing on approximately 2.5 million Russian procurement documents, satellite imagery, military publications and open source research, provides the first documented evidence that Facility 1335 is not only operational but has been significantly expanded.
The documents span tenders dating back to 2011 and cover a construction programme costing hundreds of millions of pounds. Military publications reviewed during the investigation confirm the facility was placed on combat duty in 2023. The investigation also obtained the first images of the site and the military operation behind it.
What Is Facility 1335
Facility 1335 sits inside Kosvinsky Kamen, a granite mountain rising roughly 1,300 feet above sea level in the Urals, accessible by a single road and surrounded by coniferous forests stretching hundreds of miles in every direction. A machine gun turret guards the entrance around the clock.
Former soldiers stationed at the site describe the underground network as vast enough to accommodate buses transporting personnel between sectors. The images obtained during the investigation show a large entrance gateway built directly into the mountain, a modernised military camp, troops conducting drills in gas masks, and living quarters decorated with posters of ballistic missile launches.
What Is the Facility Used For
Facility 1335 serves as a hardened nuclear command and control centre, built to survive a direct nuclear strike and ensure Russia retains the ability to launch a retaliatory attack even if its leadership has been wiped out.
A senior Russian military figure described it as the place where “strategic missile forces will fulfil their historic mission of retaliation against any enemy.” Military publications reviewed during the investigation confirm the facility was placed on combat duty in 2023. Its entire purpose rests on a Cold War doctrine the Russians call Perimeter, known in the West as Dead Hand.
What Is Russia’s Dead Hand System
Dead Hand, officially known as Perimeter or Sistema Perimetr, is a Soviet era automated nuclear retaliation system maintained by the Russian Federation. It is built around a single purpose which is to guarantee that Russia can launch a devastating nuclear counterstrike even if its entire political leadership and military command structure has been destroyed in a surprise attack.
Rather than requiring a human decision maker to survive, the system uses a network of communication channels to transmit launch orders automatically to mobile missile systems, which in turn relay encrypted commands to surviving silos. Perimeter is fundamentally a communication system designed to make retaliation inevitable regardless of what happens to those in charge.
Putin’s Fear of a Decapitation Strike
The revival of Dead Hand did not happen in isolation. In 2020, the Kremlin released the transcript of a meeting in which Putin told senior military officials that a facility for controlling strategic nuclear forces was nearing completion and would have a very high safety margin. Since then his concern has sharpened considerably.
The development of American bunker buster bombs, most visibly demonstrated during strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, convinced Putin that even heavily fortified underground installations were no longer safe. Andy Weber, a former US assistant secretary of defence for nuclear programmes, said Putin’s investment in the facility tracks directly with his growing paranoia about decapitation strikes eliminating Russia’s leadership before it can order retaliation.
What the West Knows
Western intelligence services including those of the United States, Britain and France are understood to be aware of Facility 1335 and are actively collecting intelligence on it. The United States has simultaneously been upgrading its own equivalent facilities, including the Cheyenne Mountain complex in Colorado and the Raven Rock mountain complex in Pennsylvania.
The signals coming from Russia suggest Dead Hand may already be back in operation, driven by Russian concern over increasingly precise American conventional weapons and a rising risk of nuclear conflict.
The clearest signal of all came from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who last year posted a thinly veiled Telegram message referencing Dead Hand. Mr. Medvedev said that the U.S. President Donald Trump should know “how dangerous the fabled ‘Dead Hand’ can be”.
What This Means?
None of this points in a reassuring direction. A country rebuilding a doomsday system designed to guarantee mutually assured destruction is not a country that believes diplomacy will save it. It is a country that has started preparing for the worst.
The West has spent the better part of a decade isolating Russia economically, expanding NATO eastward, and allowing CIA and MI6 presence to deepen inside Ukraine. Whatever one thinks of Putin’s decision to invade, none of those developments were read in Moscow as anything other than provocation.
Western leaders understood this at some level and moved forward anyway, operating from a Cold War strategic playbook that assumes pressure produces concession. With Russia, it has historically produced the opposite.
Meanwhile Russian hybrid warfare is already running hot across Europe. Sabotage operations in Britain, drone incursions near NATO territory, disinformation campaigns targeting elections. These are not isolated incidents. They are the early stages of a conflict that has not yet found its full shape.
