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19-471: Doomsday Machine may refer to: Doomsday device , a hypothetical weapon which could destroy all life on the Earth Doomsday Machine (film) , a 1972 science-fiction film The Doomsday Machine (book) , a 2012 non-fiction book arguing that nuclear energy is a kind of 'Doomsday' strategy "The Doomsday Machine" ( Star Trek: The Original Series ) ,

38-442: A 1967 episode of Star Trek: The Original Series Doomsday Machine (album) , a 2005 album by melodic death metal band Arch Enemy The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017), book by Daniel Ellsberg Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Doomsday Machine . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change

57-448: A nuclear attack is that it would go off automatically without human aid and despite human intervention. Kahn conceded that some planners might see "doomsday machines" as providing a highly credible threat that would dissuade attackers and avoid the dangerous game of brinkmanship caused by the massive retaliation concept which governed US-Soviet nuclear relations in the mid-1950s. However, in his discussion of doomsday machines, Kahn raises

76-460: A simpler "gun combination"-type weapon even more quickly, although in such a case the limiting factor in developing the weapon is not usually design difficulty but rather procurement of material ( enriched uranium ). The term " Nth Country" referred to the goal to assess the difficulty of developing basic weapons design (not the development of the weapons themselves) for any country with a relatively small amount of technical infrastructure—if

95-439: A small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations." The experiment ended on April 10, 1967, after three person-years of work over two and a half calendar years. According to a heavily redacted declassified version of the summary, lab weapons experts apparently judged that the team had come up with a credible design for an implosion-style nuclear weapon . It was also judged likely that they would have been able to design

114-419: A working nuclear weapon design , using only unclassified information, and with basic computational and technical support. "The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield", the report on the experiment read, "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give

133-406: Is Virus (1980), where an earthquake is misdetected as a nuclear explosion and triggers a sequence of Automated Reaction Systems (ARS) . Various types of fictional doomsday devices have also been activated as part of an AI takeover . This includes the missile launch system in the movie WarGames (1983), control of which has been handed entirely to a computer, and Skynet 's nigh-destruction of

152-456: The 1940s and 1950s , due to the invention of nuclear weapons and the constant fear of total destruction. A well-known example is in the film Dr. Strangelove (1964), where a doomsday device, based on Szilard and Kahn's ideas, is triggered by an incompletely aborted American attack and all life on Earth is extinguished. Another is in the Star Trek episode The Doomsday Machine (1967), where

171-449: The 20th century, when advances in science and technology made world destruction (or at least the eradication of all human life) a credible scenario. Many classics in the genre of science fiction take up the theme in this respect. The term "doomsday machine" itself is attested from 1960, but the alliterative "doomsday device" has since become the more popular phrase. Since the 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test demonstrated

190-497: The Earth too radioactive to support life. RAND strategist Herman Kahn postulated that Soviet or US nuclear decision makers might choose to build a doomsday machine that would consist of a computer linked to a stockpile of hydrogen bombs, programmed to detonate them all and bathe the planet in nuclear fallout at the signal of an impending nuclear attack from another nation. The US and its doomsday device's theoretical ability to deter

209-549: The United States was the first country to develop nuclear weapons, and the USSR the second , and so on, which would be the nth ? Due to increased publicly available resources about nuclear weapons, it is reasonable to assume that a viable weapon design could be reached with even less effort today. But in the history of nuclear weapons , the development of fission weapons was never strongly hindered by basic design questions, except in

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228-518: The crew of the Enterprise fights a powerful planet-killing alien machine. However, doomsday devices also expanded to encompass many other types of fictional technology, one of the most famous of which is the Death Star , a planet-destroying, moon-sized space station . Some works have also considered the erroneous activation of doomsday devices by external factors or chain reactions . An example of both

247-409: The feasibility of making arbitrarily large nuclear devices which could cover vast areas with radioactive fallout by rendering anything around them intensely radioactive, nuclear weapons theorists such as Leo Szilard conceived of a doomsday machine, a massive thermonuclear device surrounded by hundreds of tons of cobalt which, when detonated, would create massive amounts of Cobalt-60 , rendering most of

266-516: The human race in The Terminator (1984). Nth Country Experiment The N th Country Experiment was an experiment conducted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory starting in May 1964 that sought to assess the risk of nuclear proliferation . The experiment consisted in paying three young physicists who had just received their PhDs , though they had no prior weapons experience, to develop

285-489: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Doomsday_Machine&oldid=1225676131 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Doomsday device Doomsday devices and the nuclear holocaust they bring about have been present in literature and art especially in

304-561: The problem of a nuclear-armed N th country triggering a doomsday machine, and states that he didn't advocate that the US acquire a doomsday machine. The Dead Hand (or "Perimeter") system built by the Soviet Union during the Cold War has been called a "doomsday machine" due to its fail-deadly design and nuclear capabilities. Doomsday devices started becoming more common in science fiction in

323-487: The process of creation originally undertaken by J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos . Phase II was the quantitative expansion of those basic concepts into practical application by calculating core mass, hole size, explosive thickness, etc., which are essential to the careful design of atomic weapons. Finally, Phase III was an "extension of Phase II" that involved actual implosion and fission calculations. Plutonium implosion-style designs were then formulated. Certain aspects of

342-482: The project and was replaced by Robert W. Seldon, a captain in the United States Army Reserve . Like Pipkorn and Dobson, Seldon had a physics PhD and no nuclear expertise. The experiments the physicists completed were split into three phases, each representing the "attainment of a physical level of understanding." Phase I was the understanding of basic concepts and considerations of bomb design, much like

361-485: The very first nuclear weapons programs. The Summary Report of the Nth Country Experiment was declassified—though heavily excised—in 2003. In April 1964, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (then known as Livermore Radiation Laboratory) hired physicists David A. Dobson and David N. Pipkorn to design a nuclear explosive with "militarily significant yield". The next year, Pipkorn dropped out of

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