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Doomsday Devices

So could we humans actually pull off omnicide? Even if a global nuclear war may kill off 90% of all humans, most scientists guess that it wouldn’t kill 100% and therefore wouldn’t drive us extinct. On the other hand, the story of nuclear radiation, nuclear EMP and nuclear winter all demonstrate that the greatest hazards may be ones we haven’t even thought of yet. It’s incredibly difficult to foresee all aspects of the aftermath, and how nuclear winter, infrastructure collapse, elevated mutation levels and desperate armed hordes might interact with other problems such as new pandemics, ecosystem collapse and effects we haven’t yet imagined. My personal assessment is therefore that although the probability of a nuclear war tomorrow triggering human extinction isn’t large, we can’t confidently conclude that it’s zero either.

Omnicide odds increase if we upgrade today’s nuclear weapons into a deliberate doomsday device. Introduced by RAND strategist Herman Kahn in 1960 and popularized in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, a doomsday device takes the paradigm of mutually assured destruction to its ultimate conclusion. It’s the perfect deterrent: a machine that automatically retaliates against any enemy attack by killing all of humanity.

One candidate for the doomsday device is a huge underground cache of so-called salted nukes, preferably humongous hydrogen bombs surrounded by massive amounts of cobalt. Physicist Leo Szilard argued already in 1950 that this could kill everyone on Earth: the hydrogen bomb explosions would render the cobalt radioactive and blow it into the stratosphere, and its five-year half-life is long enough for it to settle all across Earth (especially if twin doomsday devices were placed in opposite hemispheres), but short enough to cause lethal radiation intensity. Media reports suggest that cobalt bombs are now being built for the first time. Omnicidal opportunities could be bolstered by adding bombs optimized for nuclear winter creation by maximizing long-lived aerosols in the stratosphere. A major selling point of a doomsday device is that it’s much cheaper than a conventional nuclear deterrent: since the bombs don’t need to be launched, there’s no need for expensive missile systems, and the bombs themselves are cheaper to build since they need not be light and compact enough to fit into missiles.

Another possibility is the future discovery of a biological doomsday device: a custom-designed bacterium or virus that kills all humans. If its transmissibility were high enough and its incubation period long enough, essentially everybody could catch it before they realized its existence and took countermeasures. There’s a military argument for building such a bioweapon even if it can’t kill everybody: the most effective doomsday device is one that combines nuclear, biological and other weapons to maximize the chances of deterring the enemy.

AI Weapons

A third technological route to omnicide may involve relatively dumb AI weapons. Suppose a superpower builds billions of those bumblebee-sized attack drones from chapter 3 and uses them to kill anyone except their own citizens and allies, identified remotely by a radio-frequency ID tag just as most of today’s supermarket products. These tags could be distributed to all citizens to be worn on bracelets or as transdermal implants, as in the totalitarianism section. This would probably spur an opposing superpower to build something analogous. When war accidentally breaks out, all humans would be killed, even unaffiliated remote tribes, because nobody would be wearing both kinds of ID tag. Combining this with a nuclear and biological doomsday device would further improve chances of successful omnicide.