Doomsday Machine

Theoretical device that automatically triggers the nuclear destruction of an aggressor nation or the entire global population. Herman Kahn, a U.S. nuclear physicist who participated in the design of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, was working as a nuclear theorist for the RAND Corporation, a U.S. national-security think tank, during the early 1960s. In 1961, while brainstorming with RAND nuclear strategists, he developed a concept that he called a doomsday machine.

In its original conception, Kahn's doomsday machine was designed to ensure the annihilation of the world's population. As such, he reasoned, a doomsday [Page 218]machine could be the ultimate nuclear deterrent. He postulated that if the United States had an operative doomsday machine in place, no enemy nation would risk launching a nuclear attack or any other large-scale assault, for fear of destroying the world.

Critics assailed Kahn's conception as he described it in his book On Thermonuclear War (1961). A major problem with Kahn's doomsday machine was the total lack of control that government and military leaders would have over the machine once it was activated. Kahn argued that this feature was part of what made the doomsday machine an unexcelled deterrent. He maintained that the lack of human intervention inspired an even greater fear in potential aggressors, making it even less likely that they would resort to a nuclear strike on the United States. Kahn also believed that it would be advantageous for U.S. leaders to appear as if their reactions to a nuclear crisis might be irrational, again boosting the machine's deterrent capability.

Kahn's theories inspired British film director Stanley Kubrick to make the classic 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In this film, an insane U.S. Air Force colonel sets in motion a doomsday scenario that generals and government leaders are powerless to stop.

Although the United States has never constructed a doomsday machine of the ilk Kahn envisioned, the U.S. nuclear strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) mimics the concept of a doomsday machine. At the time MAD was first developed, in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union were building their nuclear arsenals so that each nation would have the ability to annihilate the other and, via the resultant massive radioactive fallout, would be capable of destroying the entire world's population. The MAD strategy postulated that the United States, by ensuring the Soviet Union's doom with multiple nuclear attacks, would deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear attack on the United States.

In 1993, U.S. and British newspapers reported on the discovery of Russia's top-secret doomsday machine, created by Soviet scientists in the 1970s. The automated system, known as the dead hand in Russia, becomes operative when Russia has suffered a nuclear attack and its government leaders and military are unable to respond. Although U.S. and foreign analysts believe that Russia still has the dead-hand system in place, Russian leaders neither confirm nor deny its existence.