FOOTNOTES:

[i] “… explosions that were tested and used in the past two years on Earth have the potential to destroy all of life…”

“A doomsday device is a hypothetical construction — usually a weapon — which could destroy all life on the Earth, or destroy the Earth itself (bringing “doomsday”, a term used for the end of planet Earth).

Doomsday devices have been present in literature and art especially in the 20th century, when advances in science and technology allowed humans to imagine a definite and plausible way of actively destroying the world or all life on it (or at least human life). Many classics in the genre of science fiction take up the theme in this respect, especially The Purple Cloud (1901) by M. P. Shiel in which the accidental release of a gas kills all people on the planet.

After the advent of nuclear weapons, especially hydrogen bombs, they have usually been the dominant components of fictional doomsday devices. RAND strategist Herman Kahn proposed a “Doomsday Machine” in the 1950s which would consist of a computer linked to a stockpile of hydrogen bombs, programmed to detonate them all and bathe the planet in nuclear fallout at the signal of an impending nuclear attack from another nation. Such a scheme, fictional as it was, epitomized for many the extremes of the suicidal logic behind the strategy of mutually assured destruction, and it was famously parodied in the Stanley Kubrick film from 1964, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It is also a main topic of the movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in parallel with the species extermination theme. Most such models either rely on the fact that hydrogen bombs can be made arbitrarily large (see Teller-Ulam design) or that they can be “salted” with materials designed to create long-lasting and hazardous fallout (e.g.; a cobalt bomb).

There are many unconfirmed, anecdotal reports of a Soviet doomsday device involving a 200-megaton hydrogen bomb sheathed in (or, alternately, “salted” with) a highly radioactive material, usually said to be cobalt, of sufficient quantity to saturate the earth’s atmosphere with deadly fallout should the device be detonated. Details regarding this device vary according to the source, but enough similarities in the dozens of different stories exist to suggest at least some basis in truth. According to various sources, at some point between 1967 and 1985, the device was designed but never constructed; built but never activated; built and activated, but dismantled at the end of the cold war; or designed and constructed in such a manner that it can never be de-activated, and is still in existence today. Tales of its location and means of operation are equally diverse: it was in an underground bunker west of Moscow, Siberia, the Ukraine, etc.; it was installed on a special rocket booster that would deliver it to the upper atmosphere upon activation; it was actually a series of bombs placed at intervals along the western border of the USSR; it was to be detonated upon command from the Kremlin, automatically by a special computer, a seismic trigger, or upon detection of incoming missiles. Many more versions exist, such as one with the device being permanently installed in the hold of an unmarked tramp freighter, steaming randomly from port to port in the North Sea.”

— Reference:  Wikipedia.org

[ii]  “… paradigm…”

“Historian of science Thomas Kuhn gave this word its contemporary meaning when he adopted it to refer to the set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. Kuhn himself came to prefer the terms exemplar and normal science, which have more exact philosophical meanings. However, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as:

• what is to be observed and scrutinized
• the kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject
• how these questions are to be structured
• how the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted

Alternatively, the Oxford English Dictionary defines paradigm as “a pattern or model, an exemplar.”

— Reference:  Wikipedia.org