1970s Computer Still Running Soviet Doomsday Device?

This is a little more serious than what I usually post about, but I thought it was quite interesting because it reminded me of elements of several old TV show and movies.
A new book due to be released in the US in December, claims that a 'doomsday' mechanism was created in the Soviet Union years ago-and is still armed.
Reminding me very much of the 'Operation: Spoilsport' episode of the 1980s TV series Greatest American Hero, the system called Perimetr would launch strategic nuclear missiles automatically under certain circumstances.

Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is “yes” then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal...We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s.

Fortunately, it seems the system is not totally autonomous. A more detailed article at Slate reveals the final decision will lie with the human monitors of the Perimetr system.
In fact, much has been made in TV shows and movies about a 'failsafe' barrier to one lone guy out there launching a missile. From Slate:

We'd been told that to launch a missile, two keys must be inserted simultaneously into their slots by two separate launch officers, and that the slots for the keys were located at a sufficient distance from each other that one madman couldn't, say, shoot the other crewman and then use both his arms to twist both the keys simultaneously.
But the missile crewmen I talked to told me they'd figured out a way to defeat that impediment with a spoon and a string. Not that they were planning to do it, but that they knew someone could do it.
You just shoot the other guy and "rig up a thing where you tie a string to one end of a spoon," he told me, "and tie the other end to the guy's key. Then you can sit in your chair and twist your key with one hand while you yank on the spoon with the other hand to twist the other key over."

Remember when a drunken Richard Pryor did something just like that in Superman III? I don't mean to trivialize this subject by referring to pop culture, but the only reference points many of us have, especially if we grew up post-cold war, is what we've seen in TV shows and movies. In fact, movies and tv can be used as teaching tools when dealing with these subjects. Some teachers use the film Thirteen Days to teach students about the Cuban missile crisis.
I think much could be learned from the ending of WarGames, when the WOPR computer system decided regarding nuclear war, the only winning move was not to play.

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