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Shortly after US president Donald Trump hung up a call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin this spring, an obscure shortwave radio channel, broadcasting from a military base somewhere in Russia, sprang to life.
Through a fog of static, at 4625 kHz on the shortwave dial, a man’s voice spoke in monotone: “Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatiana, Ivan.” He repeats the message—spelled out in the Russian phonetic alphabet—followed by a series of numbers and letters. The whole message reads: “NZhTI 01263 BOLTANKA 4430 9529.” What it means is anyone’s guess, but lots of people were guessing.
This radio station, dubbed UVB-76, has spent much of 2025 broadcasting cryptic messages, strange music, and pirate interruptions. The channel has elicited fascination for decades. This time, however, something is different. Now, Moscow’s network of propagandists and warmongers are suddenly fascinated by this obscure channel.
UVB-76’s real purpose is almost certainly innocuous and mundane. But in recent weeks, Moscow has capitalized on the eerie fixation with the channel to stoke fears of nuclear armageddon.
The Buzzer
Shortwave radio, which operates on a different frequency and a wider spectrum than AM or FM radio broadcasts, has always had a particularly dedicated fandom. Because shortwave broadcasts can traverse huge distances, it became a favorite medium for soldiers and spies.
Throughout the Cold War, ham radio hobbyists searched the shortwave dial in search of agencies communicating with their agents. Tune in to the right frequency, and you could hear a KGB officer reading out coded messages for their undercover operatives in America, a Cuban intelligence officer relaying a message to Moscow, or a CIA asset in eastern Europe trying to get in touch with Langley.
The end of the Cold War and the advent of modern technology made secure communication easier—making these shortwave radio stations largely, though not entirely, obsolete. At the same time, however, amateur radio fans began congregating online, and they scoured for spy stations on the radio dial.
“What have you stumbled on to?” reads a message posted to curious visitors to Spynumbers.com. “Instructions to spies? Messages exchanged between drug dealers? Deliberate attempts at deception and mis-information? Chances are, all of the above!” The website’s users kept a meticulous database of the shortwave stations that, they believed, were used by spooks. Operators around the world logged the station at 4625 Khz as “The Buzzer.”
The station, which was categorized only as “Slavic,” is thought to have come online in the 1970s. The fact that it could be heard straight across the globe—from London to Sydney—suggested that it had some pretty powerful transmitters behind it. A perpetual tone, an incessant buzzing, was thought to be a way for the operator to reserve the frequency, even when it wasn’t actively being used. The buzzing would infrequently stop, perhaps once a week, replaced with other tones or a man reading a message using the Russian phonetic alphabet. Try as they might, listeners never decoded those messages.
Starting in the late 1990s, the station used the call sign УЗБ-76—later mistranslated as UVB-76—although it would change that handle repeatedly over the years. Nevertheless, the incorrect title stuck. As did the station’s mythos, which has grown over the decades to try to explain UVB-76’s mysterious signal.
As a 2011 feature in WIRED explained, theories about UVB-76’s true purpose went from the decidedly unsexy, such as the idea that the station was testing atmospheric changes in the ionosphere (as reported in a 2008 academic paper); to the truly cinematic—that it was either a way to contact aliens or a “doomsday device, which had been programmed to launch a wave of nuclear missiles at the US in the event the Kremlin was flattened by a sneak attack.”
For years, the station’s main signal emanated from a military outpost some 50 miles north of Moscow. When urban explorers reached the site in 2011, they found it abandoned—but forgotten radio equipment and log books suggested that it had once been the headquarters of UVB-76. (“In general, it was boring,” the explorers wrote.) Russian broadcaster RT also visited the site that year, reporting that the site was, most likely, just a mundane part of Russia’s military communication apparatus.
In the years since, an online community has sprung up across YouTube, Reddit, X, VKontakte, and across multiple dedicated podcasts and online forums. Its fanbase stretches across history buffs, ham radio operators, and those obsessed with creepypasta. A dedicated site, Priyom.org, sprang up to meticulously catalog UVB-76’s many mysterious messages.
With the publicity came radio pirates, who have spent years interrupting the signal with meowing and the band REM and have even knocked it offline altogether. In at least one case, a frequency hijacker seemed to communicate with UVB-76’s operator. (Or, possibly, another pirate.)
The online buzz has driven mainstream coverage. News outlets have, over the years, called the station “chilling” and “ghostly,” writing that it “baffles scientists.”
“It's natural to be fascinated with things you don't have a clear answer to,” says Māris Goldmanis, a historian who runs a website devoted to tracking these shortwave stations, including UVB-76.
The fascination with the station was offset only by the fact that its transmissions weren’t very interesting. Of the hundreds of messages logged on Priyom, none have actually been decoded. There is little doubt that the channel is used by the Russian military, because it has admitted as much. A military journal obliquely references the site as part of a program to maintain communication between Russia’s various military assets, even amid warfare. “Its main goal is indeed to serve the Russian strategic military radio network,” Goldmanis says.
Given Russia’s huge territory, Goldmanis says, shortwave networks like UVB-76 are useful for connecting far-flung outposts. “This is a normal peacetime operation,” he says.
It’s impossible to say whether the channel has an axillary purpose, as the Russian military is understandably secretive about its communication systems. That has left lots of room for speculation. This includes the unsubstantiated idea that UVB-76 was a central part of Moscow’s nuclear failsafe. And it has kept growing more popular.
Nuclear Blackmail
On December 11, 2024, UVB-76 once again sprang to life. After a quiet month, the station delivered 24 transmissions in a single day—a record, according to its fan club on Russian social media network VK. The transmissions themselves were standard fare (“alphabet,” “billiards,” or just nonsense words), but the volume caused a stir among those who monitor the channel.
Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti published what appears to be its first-ever article on UVB-76, summarizing the new broadcasts and explaining to its readers that “it is called a ‘Doomsday Station’ because it is believed to have been allegedly created as part of the Dead Hand system.”
Since early this year, RIA-Novosti has published roughly one story per week on UVB-76, suggesting its coded messages are related to missile strikes on Iran, the war in Ukraine, and negotiations with Trump.
RT, which had once pooh-poohed the idea that UVB-76 was part of Moscow’s nuclear deterrence, began regularly posting its broadcasts on X, writing in April that the station often broadcasts “coded alerts pre-major events”—particularly around phone calls between Trump and Putin—and suggesting that it operates as a “nuke failsafe.”
Chatter about the station grew on Telegram, the messaging app popular in Russia. Channels claimed that UVB-76 grew active “during periods of escalation” of military activity and that it served as a kind of oracle, sending its coded messages “before global events.” Some of these channels, some with millions of subscribers, are themselves close to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
“In the time of tension between Russia and the West,” Goldmanis says, “such articles are ideal for mounting tension and fear.” There is some irony in the fact that Russians seem to be spooking themselves with tales of their own military communications network, but he argues that it speaks to a deeper fear in Russia: “Fear of losing the war, fear of the state collapse, fear of Western nuclear action, fear of their own government and military.”
All of this domestic shadowboxing, in turn, drove international headlines. The British tabloid The Sun proclaimed that Russia’s “doomsday radio station” had transmitted its “cryptic ‘nuke’ code.” Belgium’s Het Laatste Nieuws reported that the radio messages had caused “heightened alertness among military analysts worldwide.” Politika, a Serbian daily newspaper, penned a lengthy article that claimed that UVB-76 “put fear in the hearts of NATO generals and the Pentagon,” which have been powerless to crack its code. (That article was republished in Russian by RT’s foreign translation service.)
Amid this new attention, Moscow’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor—responsible for monitoring, regulating, and censoring all mass media, including both shortwave radio and the internet—commented on UVB-76 for the first time. A spokesperson for the agency didn’t say much, telling RT that information about the frequency and its purpose “is not publicly available.”
As public interest increased, UVB-76 kept churning out messages. On May 23, an operator read out the code “БЕЗЗЛОБИЕ,” roughly translated to “the absence of malice,” and “ХРЮКОСТЯГ,” or “oink,” followed by a series of numbers. This message, in particular, caught the attention of Dmitry Medvedev.
Medvedev has served as both president and prime minister of Russia and now serves on the hawkish Security Council of Russia as deputy chairman. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War say Medvedev is frequently deployed by the Kremlin to “inflammatory rhetoric, often including nuclear blackmail, into the information space to spread fear among Western decision-makers and discourage future military aid to Ukraine.”
“Doomsday Radio: May's ‘lack of malice’ has been replaced by a fierce ‘oink,’” Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel. Invoking a wave of Ukrainian drone attacks that had roiled Moscow, Medvedev levied thematic insults against the Ukrainians and their backers in Europe: “Pigs,” “hogs,” and “boars.” He ended the post: “Password: ‘БЕЗЗЛОБИЕ.’ Answer: ‘ХРЮКОСТЯГ,’” the two UVB-76 codewords.
“Spasms of the Dead Hand”
Coincidental or intentional, Russia’s new fascination with UVB-76 comes just as it attempts to ratchet up fear of nuclear armageddon. To do that, Moscow is turning to that bit of Cold War lore: The Dead Hand.
Throughout the Cold War, there was a pervasive idea that the Soviets had built some kind of doomsday device. Popularized by films like Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, the idea went that Moscow had developed the ability to launch its ballistic missiles, even if all the Communist Party leadership were dead. Such a response could effectively end life on Earth.
When those films were released, in 1964, Moscow had no such program. It would take another two decades before the USSR completed its response system, codename Perimeter.
The Russian nuclear retaliation program was not quite as nefarious as the movies imagined. It was not a fully automatic nuclear response but rather a semiautomated system of real safeguards. Perimeter, housed in a deep bunker in the Ural mountains, was connected to a series of inputs: Seismic and radiation sensors, which monitored for warhead impacts on Soviet soil; and radio links back to the Kremlin. If, and only if, the system was switched on, if it detected evidence of nuclear strikes, and if the communication channel with central command was severed, Perimeter would launch a series of command rockets. These missiles, equipped with radio transmitters, would buzz through Soviet airspace broadcasting launch codes to the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
Perimeter was revealed in a 1993 op-ed in The New York Times by Bruce G. Blair, an American nuclear expert who had been handed details of the program by a Soviet scientist. He described the design of this system as the “spasms of the dead hand.”
“There’s no question in my mind that the system was built,” David Hoffman, contributing editor to The Washington Post and author of The Dead Hand, tells WIRED. “Perimeter exists, and it was a real system that was put on combat duty shortly after Mikael Gorbachev took office in 1985.”
Hoffman, who based his book on extensive interviews with those familiar with the program, says there is good evidence that Perimeter was maintained, though switched off, after the end of the Cold War. Putin’s ascent to the presidency, however, marked a “gray zone,” he says. In recent years, Russian commanders have said that the system remains operational, and Moscow has upgraded the command bunker where Perimeter was based.
And it was UVB-76 that thrust the Dead Hand program back into the news. It’s particularly conspicuous because, based on everything we know about Perimeter, there’s no way UVB-76 has any role in launching nuclear weapons.
Goldmanis concedes that UVB-76 could certainly be useful if a nuclear strike destroys Russia’s communications network, but the idea that it could automatically order missile launches is “neither logical nor technically possible,” he says. (The bunker which houses Perimeter communicates with the outside world using very-low-frequency radio, not shortwave.)
So there is no real mystery about UVB-76’s role in Russia’s Perimeter system. The only mystery is why Russian propagandists seem so intent on convincing the world that the two are related.
Since its inception, the Kremlin has actually been notoriously mum about Perimeter—odd, because part of the utility of such a weapon is its power to deter a first strike. “It is absolutely a completely absurd situation,” Hoffman says. But that has changed recently.
On July 31, Trump and Medvedev traded rambling posts on their respective social media platforms. The president fired off a Truth Social post calling India and Russia “dead economies” and excoriating Medvedev to “watch his words.”
The Russian official, meanwhile, took to Telegram to warn the American of “how dangerous the non-existent ‘dead hand’ can be 😂.”
Breaking the “Nuclear Taboo”
Despite the arms race of the Cold War, the world maintained an unspoken understanding that the use of a first-strike nuclear weapon would be immoral, irrational, and likely world-ending. Academic Nina Tannenwald calls this the “nuclear taboo.”
That taboo generally extended to threats of nuclear warfare as well. Until very recently.
Between 2022 and 2023, the Center for Strategic and International Studies tracked nearly 200 instances where Russian officials issued threats around the use of nuclear weapons, particularly as it tried to dissuade Western support for the Ukrainian government amid its ill-fated invasion. That culminated in changes to the Russian nuclear doctrine last year. The new orders, approved by Putin, allow Moscow to launch a nuclear strike in response to certain large-scale conventional attacks on Russian territory.
“Breaking the nuclear taboo—using nuclear signaling and threats—is very dangerous,” Hoffman says. It increases the likelihood of misunderstanding, misperception, and miscalculation.
While UVB-76 continued to gurgle out messages over the past week, amid an extraordinary meeting in Alaska between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, speculation about its true purpose has noticeably quieted on pro-Kremlin channels.
Hoffman is skeptical that this most recent fascination with UVB-76 and Perimeter is anything more than marginal, given that Putin himself has already begun the nuclear saber-rattling. He calls it “cartoonish” by comparison. Still, Hoffman says, “the whole lore of the Dead Hand is that it’s a monster out of control.” It’s not true, of course—“it was built as a retaliatory system,” he notes, “as a second strike”—but the idea of the Russian doomsday machine continues to loom large.
Goldmanis came around to a similar metaphor.
“The Dead Hand is also a great myth,” he says. It may be based on a real system, but secrecy breeds mystery. Like a fabled monster in a dark, impassible cave, fears can feed on themselves. “No one can be sure, as they can't access it.”
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