It’s July 2025. After a week of building tensions between Russia and the United States, following what seems to be a failed meeting between Trump and Putin in Anchorage, Donald Trump posts an oddly worded message[1] on his social network, Truth Social: He plans to “position” US nuclear submarines in the “appropriate regions,” in a clear reference to Russia. This post comes after a not-so-subtle reference by former Russian President Dimitri Medvedev on X (the social media site formerly known as Twitter) to the so-called “Dead Hand” mechanism, a method initiated in the Soviet Union era, of automatically ensuring a nuclear response if an attack eliminated all the officials in the country’s usual line of command.
This article was written by Héloise Fayet and originally published by The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists.
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