doomsday machine

doomsday machine, hypothetical device that would automatically trigger the nuclear destruction of an aggressor country or the extinction of all life on Earth in the event of a nuclear attack on the country maintaining the device. The former type of device might automatically launch a large number of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) when it detected a nuclear explosion or an imminent nuclear attack, whereas the latter might detonate several very large thermonuclear bombs that were specially designed to produce great amounts of long-lasting radioactive fallout. Because the aggressor country’s annihilation would in either case be guaranteed, the doomsday machine was viewed as the ultimate nuclear deterrent. The concept was developed by the American nuclear physicist Herman Kahn and discussed in his book On Thermonuclear War (1960).

According to some critics, the major problem with Kahn’s doomsday machine was that government and military leaders would have no control over the machine once it had been activated. Kahn replied that this feature was in fact what made the doomsday machine an unexcelled deterrent. He maintained that the absence of human intervention would inspire an even greater fear in potential aggressors, making it even less likely that they would resort to a first nuclear strike.

Kahn’s theories were the target of British film director Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In this dark comedy, a deranged U.S. general initiates a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union that sets in motion a doomsday scenario that military and government leaders are powerless to stop.

Although the United States has never constructed a doomsday machine, the concept was mimicked in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which was the basis of both U.S. and Soviet nuclear strategy in the 1960s and ’70s. According to MAD, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union were so large that neither could launch a nuclear first strike against the other without remaining vulnerable to a devastating counterattack.

In 1993 a respected U.S. expert on the Russian military asserted in an interview that the Soviet Union had developed a type of doomsday machine in the early 1980s and that the device was still operative in Russia. The automated system, known as the Dead Hand, was allegedly designed to launch nuclear missiles at U.S. targets if it detected a nuclear attack on Moscow and if communications links with top military commanders were cut (indicating that the commanders had been killed). The existence of a semiautomated version of the device, which in the event of a crisis would transfer general launch authority to a small group of duty officers in an underground bunker, was subsequently confirmed by a few former Soviet officials, though several others denied it or refused to comment. The latter accounts were supported by formerly secret documentary evidence in The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (2010), by the American journalist David Hoffman, which received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.