Comment by mare_liberyum
12 years ago
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail_deadly
Fail deadly mechanisms go off unless they are explicitly told not to. During the cold war, Russia implemented fail deadly policies in an attempt to assure a retaliatory nuclear strike would go off even if most in power were taken out by a first strike.
I always thought that the doomsday machine in "Dr. Strangelove" was an invention of Kubrick's. I had no idea that this was a real thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertvaya_Ruka