Doomsday device

Doomsday devices and the nuclear holocaust they bring about have been present in literature and art especially in the 20th century, when advances in science and technology made world destruction (or at least the eradication of all human life) a credible scenario.

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.

[3] 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.

[6] 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.

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.