“And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by decision makers,” Kahn wrote, “it is still not controllable enough.” No machine should be that powerful by itself-but no one person should be either. Even an infinitesimal risk of error is too great to justify the Doomsday Machine’s existence. Kahn concluded that automating the extinction of all life on Earth would be immoral. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference.
But megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. We have a word for the scale of destruction that the Doomsday Machine would unleash: megadeath. There is a terrible flash of light, a great booming sound, then a sustained roar. The fission chain reaction that produces an atomic explosion is initiated enough times over to extinguish all life on Earth. If radiation levels suggest nuclear explosions in, say, three American cities simultaneously, the sensors notify the Doomsday Machine, which is programmed to detonate several nuclear warheads in response. The sensors are designed to sniff out signs of the impending apocalypse-not to prevent the end of the world, but to complete it.
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