Russia can launch nukes without humans — North Korea may want the same power

North Korea, at the first session of the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly in March, amended its constitution to require the Korean People’s Army to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes if a foreign party kills the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un.  

“If the command and control system over the state nuclear forces is placed in danger by hostile forces’ attacks,” states the amended Article 3 of the nuclear policy law, “a nuclear strike shall be launched automatically and immediately.”

After the amendment, Greg Scarlatoiu, president and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told me North Korea’s nuclear weapons “are meant for a single purpose: providing a deterrent to secure the Supreme Leader’s personal security.”

“The Kim regime was rattled by successful U.S. operations to remove the top leaders of Venezuela and Iran,” he added.  

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has the ability to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike immediately on the command of Kim or in his absence. But can it launch one “automatically?”  

It is possible, after all, for machines to end the world as we know it on their own. 

Calling it “like something out of one of the worst James Bond movies,” Military.com writer Blake Stilwell noted that “the Soviet Union developed a world-ending mechanism that would launch all of its nuclear weapons without any command from an actual human.” Moscow first activated the system in 1985.

The Russian Federation now operates that mechanism, dubbed “Perimeter,” which controls at least all of its land-based nuclear weapons. Russia possesses the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Perimeter, known in the West as “Dead........

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