doomsday device

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See also: Doomsday Device

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Coined as Doomsday Machine by military strategist Herman Kahn.[1]

Noun

doomsday device (plural doomsday devices)

  2. A hypothetical weapon (often a bomb) programmed to automatically be used in response to certain attacks, usually with very dire consequences (such as the annihilation of the world).
    • 1964, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, spoken by Narrator:
      For more than a year, ominous rumors had been privately circulating among high-level Western leaders that the Soviet Union had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon: a doomsday device.
    • 2008 April 27, Ben Stein, “Wall Street, Run Amok”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      Of course, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, is calling for merging the S.E.C. with the easygoing Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in the financial equivalent of setting off a Doomsday Device.
  3. An extremely powerful weapon.

Synonyms

See also

References

  1. ^ Herman Kahn (1960) On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, pages 144–145: “I would like to start this section on “not looking or being too dangerous” with some comments on the strategic theory of three conceptualized devices, which I will call the Doomsday Machine, the Doomsday-in-a-Hurry Machine, and the Homicide Pact Machine.”

Further reading

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