1. Is There Really Such a Thing as a Doomsday Device? (Dr Strangelove)
Yes, and in fact, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb exists because of it, and the absurdity of weapons of mass destruction in general. Pitting human military forces against each another when no other resolution can be reached is one thing, but indiscriminately vaporising thousands, if not millions of people in one fell swoop is quite another, and one the global community needed to consider in the wake of the atomic strikes which provided World War II's sombre climax. Dr Strangelove satirises the madness that is weaponised nuclear power, however, unlike, say, the lurid fantasy world portrayed in A Clockwork Orange, the mechanism at the heart of Dr Strangelove is all too real. During 1983, The NATO operation, Able Archer 83, simulated an escalation in aggression from Soviet forces, culminating in a DEFCON 1 nuclear alert, and a NATO-backed tactical nuclear attack. Part exercise, and part show of force, Cold War tension between the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. led to the Soviets suspecting that the purported exercise was in fact a ruse for preparations for an actual strike. Documents providing insight into just how close the world came to nuclear war were released as recently as May, 2013. A report on Able Archer 83 by the (U.S.) President's Intelligence Advisory Board, which is likely to go into even more precise detail, remains classified. At any rate, were the Soviets correct, and NATO struck in such a way as to annihilate their military leadership, would that have been the end of it? Though former-Soviet sources have given conflicting reports, the majority consensus is that a so-called Perimeter or Dead Hand system was installed during the Cold War and may be operational to this day. While its level of automation is unclear, the fact remains that there is potential for error, an accidental strike, or a full-blown intentional strike to bring about Armageddonor, as it exists in military parlance, mutually assured destruction. Thanks to placing human and mechanical fallibility at the controls of the power to destroy the world many times over, there is
ample evidence to suggest that its a miracle were still here. And given how much remains classified, a complete portrait of our brushes with the apocalypse is yet to be unveiled.