Megadeath

Megadeath (also English megacorpse ) is a short form for one million deaths in a democide , especially by weapons of mass destruction .

The term was coined in 1953 during the Cold War by the American strategist Herman Kahn in connection with simulation games regarding the consequences of a nuclear war . It found widespread circulation through his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War . Kahn classified the consequences of a scenario in which the losses of the United States would be “only” 10 megatotes instead of 100 as “tragic but foreseeable”.

In the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strange or: How I learned to love the bomb , in a scene on the table in front of the figure of General Buck Turgidson there is a folder with the inscription "World Targets in Megadeaths".

The metal band Megadeth derived their name from Kahn's word creation.

literature

• Herman Kahn: On Thermonuclear War . Princeton University Press, 1961.