Russia has rebuilt a secret Urals mountain bunker and put its Cold War "Dead Hand" nuclear retaliation system back on duty, The Sunday Times and Danwatch reported on September 26.

The joint investigation with the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative group founded by exiled Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, focuses on Object 1335, also called Facility 1335, a command complex dug into Kosvinsky Kamen, a granite peak above the village of Kytlym. From there the Strategic Missile Forces could send launch orders to every surviving missile in Russia's arsenal if a surprise nuclear strike killed the country's leaders.

Russian officials have hinted at the system, known in Russia as Perimetr, for years, but this is the first time those claims have been tied to physical work at the site. The revival comes with no limits on the world's two largest nuclear arsenals since New START expired in February. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has written of a next era of nuclear arms control, but US President Donald Trump rejected a Kremlin offer to keep observing the treaty's caps, and Moscow has since put the Sarmat and Poseidon strategic weapons into service.

"The simplest explanation is that the Russians are probably putting the Dead Hand back into operation. It's a big claim, but sometimes things are what they look like," Jeffrey Lewis, a lecturer in nuclear disarmament and arms control at Stanford University, told Danwatch.

The reporters built their case from Russian military procurement records that Danwatch harvested from a public tender database over several months in 2024, despite Russian efforts to restrict access to it. From 2018 the defence ministry's 8th Main Directorate for Military Construction placed thousands of orders for the site, for everything from rock drills, mine ventilation and filters rated for chemical, biological and radioactive fallout to blast-proof substations, safes and infrared sensors.

The two outlets give different tallies of the materials. Danwatch counts 22,000 tonnes of reinforcing steel and steel elements, more than 56,000 tonnes of cement, 600 km of electrical cable and 14,000 lamps bought between 2018 and 2024. The Sunday Times puts the steel at about 20,000 tonnes and says the busiest phase came in 2020-2021, with 361.4 km of cable, 5,429 lamps, 30 transformers and 160 ventilation units used in 2020 alone. Its reading of the tenders found at least 24 underground chambers and roughly 2.5 km in a straight line between the main and emergency exits.

"These are colossal quantities," Per Goltermann, a construction engineering professor at the Technical University of Denmark, told Danwatch. He estimated the cement alone would make about 150,000 cubic metres of concrete. "It is an enormous construction project."

One tender, quoted by Danwatch, describes the site as "designed to contain a complex with equipment for control, communications and security systems, as well as permanent accommodation for personnel on combat readiness and in everyday life", and requires contractors to hold an FSB licence for work involving state secrets. Satellite images show heavy digging at the mountain's entrances, a new road and work on what appear to be six new entrances. Former soldiers from military unit 20003, which guards the site, said the tunnels are so long that buses carry personnel between sections.

The clearest evidence comes from Russian veterans themselves. Writing in a Strategic Missile Forces veterans' magazine in 2022, retired Major General V G Khalin, who helped build the original system, said "plans are under way to place its automation system on experimental combat duty at Facility 1335". In July 2025 Colonel Yu Andreev wrote in the same publication that "after many years of experimental work at Facility 1335, it was placed on combat duty in 2023", The Sunday Times reported.

Khalin, who says he helped lead a modernisation of Perimetr in 2005-2010 under a secret presidential decree, wrote in 2026 that "the best monument to Gleb Yuryevich will be the commissioning of Object 1335... which, at his initiative, incorporates the technical capability for an automatic retaliatory strike", referring to the late weapons designer Gleb Vasilyev. Vladimir Putin himself told military commanders in 2020 that "the creation of an absolutely secure facility for controlling strategic nuclear forces, among others, is nearing completion".

Perimetr was switched on in 1985, the Soviet answer to fears of a decapitating first strike. If the system detected nuclear blasts on Russian soil and lost contact with the leadership, crews in the bunker could fire command rockets that broadcast launch orders to surviving silos and launchers. "Perimeter is actually a communication system," said Pavel Podvig, who runs the Russian Nuclear Forces project. "If you are struck, you need to make sure you can transmit the order for retaliatory action."

Andy Weber, US assistant secretary of defence for nuclear, chemical and biological defence programmes under President Barack Obama, said the evidence points to reactivation. "Putin is very paranoid about decapitation strikes. He always has been. So it makes sense that he would prioritise this," he told Danwatch. He suggested the public tenders may have been deliberate. "What good is such a system if the other side doesn't know about it? Putin wants his adversaries to know that this system is operational."

Tom Roseth, a Russian security specialist at the Norwegian Staff College, saw the upgrade as protection against US bunker-busting bombs of the kind used on Iran's nuclear sites in 2025. "It appears that the Russians are securing this facility against every type of attack. To protect 1335 and the command-and-control facilities of the nuclear forces, they therefore have to dig even deeper and reinforce the site even more," he told The Sunday Times.

Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador to Ukraine who advised the US delegation at Cold War arms talks in Geneva, said the system was built to calm Moscow rather than scare Washington, but that Khalin's talk of automation made him "a little bit nervous". "At some point, it sounds like you are taking the human out of the loop," he told Danwatch.

The Dead Hand has surfaced in public before. In 2011 the then commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, General Sergei Karakayev, confirmed the system existed. In August 2025 Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, warned Trump on Telegram of "how dangerous the fabled 'Dead Hand' can be", prompting Trump to order two nuclear submarines into "appropriate regions".

The work at Kosvinsky Kamen is part of a broader overhaul of Russia's nuclear infrastructure, which has included new storage sites in Russia and Belarus. The US is upgrading its own mountain command centres at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado and Raven Rock in Pennsylvania. The Kremlin and presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to the reporters' questions.