Dooms day machine is not a joke

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2008)

I saw this movie when it was in the theaters as the opening show to the main feature which was "From Russia with Love." At the time, I did not realize that its characters were describing a real dooms day device that could be and perhaps has been made. I see from the comments that your readers do not realize this either. Mankind now has the knowledge to build a device to destroy the Earth forever.
This film is NOT about a nuclear war: it is about a nuclear war in which a nuclear doomsday machine has been detonated, hence the end of the world. Further, it is clear from other comments that IMDb readers do not realize this distinction and do not realize that the world can be destroyed: I quote: Times Online August 08, 2007 Dr Strangelove and the real Dooms day machine by Christopher Coker P. D. Smith DOOMSDAY MEN The real Dr Strangelove and the dream of the super weapon 552pp. Allen Lane. £20. 9 78 071 399815 3 ...Smith's study is the gripping, untold story of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, which first came to public attention in 1950 when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on radio: science was on the verge of creating a Doomsday Bomb. For the first time in history, mankind would soon have the ability to destroy all life on the planet. The shock wave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond.
What Szilard had in mind was the third of the "alphabet bombs" that came to characterize an entire age. The first, the A-bomb, had been used to incinerate two Japanese cities. Teller's H-bomb blasted its way into public consciousness a few years later. Finally, there was the ultimate weapon: the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb that could "transmute" an element such as cobalt into a radioactive element about 320 times as powerful as radium. A deadly radioactive cloud could be released into the atmosphere and carried by the westerly winds across the surface of the earth. Every living thing inhaling it, or even touched by it, would be doomed to certain death. In the autumn of 1950, Szilard's fears were given independent validation by Dr James R. Arnold of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago. Arnold, slide-rule in hand, had started out to debunk Szilard's arguments. He finished by publishing a set of calculations that showed that a Doomsday device, perhaps two-and-a-half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri, could indeed be built...
The Cobalt bomb was largely forgotten after the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went. So too disappeared the fear of a Doomsday machine that could not be overridden by human intervention. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and the ice of the Cold War had begun to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is "yes" then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system.
Bruce Blair has speculated that President Bush's September 2001 proposal for a new generation of weapons, including the robust nuclear earth penetrator, or "bunker-buster", might be intended to knock out the underground command post that controls the system. The Bush administration withdrew its request for funding for the program at the end of 2005, after facing fierce domestic opposition. Some military analysts, nevertheless, believe that research is continuing into these weapons. We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s. Those of us who think Dr Strangelove to be the most telling commentary on the nuclear age should not be surprised. To paraphrase the novelist J. G. Ballard, old or not, the system remains a vivid demonstration, arranged for our benefit by the machine, of our own as a species. http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2648363,00.html See also http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/#page_start In addition to this, there is the problem recounted in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that when scientists created the atomic bomb, they calculated the odds at about one chance in a million that such an explosion would end the world by starting a chain reaction in which sea water would separate into hydrogen and oxygen and ignite, turning our planet into a star and our solar system into a binary star system. But those calculations are now old and should be redone with a modern computer.
These details need to be included in a special features section of the DVD so that viewers will not assume that this film is a mere cold war relic with no modern relevance.