You see it all the time in sci-fi shows. Some starship or station, overrun with enemies, and the captain valiantly destroys the whole thing with a code and a button (sometimes with a 2nd in command verifying it). Its usually not so much as a bomb on the ship, but the self-destruct overrides safeties and overheats the engines or runs a warp core breach or drops the crystals into the anti-matter chamber or something.
Does this exist in real life? Do our military tanks or ships or planes have some procedure that involves it self-destructing itself to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemy? I’m not talking about if a crew decides to, for example, set fire to the ammo room and blow themselves up that way. I’m talking about an actual, programmed computer chain reaction done on purpose with the intent to destroy the vessel. I’ve read about crews that were forced to land in hostile territory that spent time ripping out computers and stuff like that, but that’s not what I’m talking about
The U2 did. They’re still used some, not exactly secret anymore, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if they still did (wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t either).
It was on a 60 second timer, had to be started by the pilot. Pilots could choose a mechanic they trusted to arm it. Anecdotaly, some pilots still thought it would really be set to explode as soon as they triggered it.
When Francis Gary Powers was shot down, he did not manage to activate it. He got some criticism for it, though he claimed plausibly that he wasn’t able to.
Do airports count as ‘stations’? Military airports sometimes have bombs buried under the runways to be used in the event that the airport is overtaken by hostile forces.
Got a cite for that? A bomb buried under the runway would present some interesting maintenance challenges. I expect it would be easier to just drop an anti-runway bomb when departing the area.
Back in the 1960 and 1970s the F-111 aircraft did for a while. On that aircraft the entire cockpit capsule could be ejected in an emergency. Therefore some classified stuff could fall intact into enemy hands if the aircrew ejected. They were disabling that system when I was working on them. Evidently it was a maintenance nightmare and not worth all the effort.
The FBCB2 computers used on military vehicles have a DESTROY button that wipes the hard drive and (I believe) permanently damages it beyond use. It is my understanding that if the hard drive is destroyed in this manner, it cannot even be reimaged or reused at all afterwards. It is possible that the button just performs a bunch of rewrites over the disk to prevent recovery of the data, but I think that it also melts the disk or otherwise physically destroys it as well. I don’t know. I’m not allowed to press that button.
Aren’t missiles routinely equipped with a self-destruct mechanism? That way if their guidance system fails and they’re heading off course, they can be destroyed in the air rather then allowed to come down on some random location.
I just checked the manual. Nothing cool happens, unfortunately. Pressing the DESTROY button sends a distress signal to headquarters and then overwrites all data and .exe files on the disk. So the operating system has to be reloaded, but the hard drive is reusable.
I think that a self-destruct mechanism was meant to be the SF equivalent of scuttling a ship. Scuttling has been used on many ships, but doesn’t require a bomb or explosive device (as noted above)
The first appearance of a self-destruct in an SF movie (or, to my knowledge, any SF) was the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, where the hero uses the self-destruct as the Swiss Family Robinson did, to get rid of his ship and avoid attracting the unwanted attention of hostile forces (aliens, in this case, not pirates). It was a prettynonspectacular effect, unlike virtually every depiction in SF cinema since, and made a sort of sense. It’d be interesting if our idea of a “self destruct” device derives from scuttling via Johann Wyss’ book.
Self-destruct showed up after that in Star Trek (as a bluff in “The Corbomite Maneuver”, but later as a real option), then in the movie Alien, then all over the place. The unibquity of it was parodied and commented on in the SF TV-movie Something is Out There, when the earth guy asks the alien woman if she had a self-destruct device on board. “Why would I have something like THAT?” she reasonably asks. (Well, to get rid of the big Nasty alien, of course, but it’s not an option).
I don’t know when the idea of incorporating any real self-destruct mechanisms in flying items got started, and don’t know of any for a fact myself. Craig Thomas, in the novel Firefox Down! talks about one being incorporated into the titular Firefox. IIRC, that device wasn’t meant to destroy the entire plane, but only to keep certain secret devices out of enemy hands. That seems a bit more reasonable, and wouldn’t require as much explosive. Just as self-destruct looks like a counterpart to scuttling a ship, such limited self-destruct is analogous to putting secret orders in a weighted bag or folder that could be dropped over the side of the ship.
Filmmakers LOVE self-destruct devices, of course, because it gives you a literally explosive finish, which looks good on film. But these are the same guys who like to have perfect silencers on guns, let people fire guns in enclosed spaces without any effect on their hearing, and routinely screw up things about computers. So why trust them on self-destruct?
My brother told me that at his university there was some old computer hardware from the 60s or maybe 50s sitting around in the basement hallways that had a “grenade” button. Hey, the Soviets are invading our top secret computer installation, hit grenade to blow that shit up and we’re evacuating! Makes you wonder how many technicians accidentally hit that grenade button, and when they removed the grenades from the consoles.
Note that even in Star Trek the self destruct mechanism isn’t including extra bombs or photon torpedoes–it’s just removing the antimatter containment which allows the antimatter fuel to mix with the regular matter of the ship in an uncontrolled way, leading to the release of a heck of a lot of energy E=mc^2 style. For wet navy ships it’s usually enough to open or blow a hole in the hull and let the ship sink.
Not to hijack, but it’s by no means established that Powers was shot down or that he even attempted to use any of the self-destruct/suicide materials. That the largely intact aircraft and largely uninjured pilot ended up in Soviet hands is an unsolved mystery pointing to another sequence of events.
But in the context of this thread, yes, the U2 was never meant to land anywhere but safe territory in less than many small pieces of plane and pilot.
What exactly are you referring to? Are you referring to Mentyukov’s claims that he intercepted the U2 with his aircraft instead of it being shot down? I find that less plausible. It’s pretty clear that missiles were launched, and they were capable of hitting a U2, as shown by the one later shot down in Cuba. In any case, I don’t think it matters that much.
It is true that many Americans assumed that the pilot would not survive being shot down at altitude, but that’s not really the same as deliberately trying to make sure that the pilot would die. He was given poison with which to commit suicide if he wished, but by all accounts it was optional, not required.
Regarding spacecraft : any really high end spacecraft is going to have something at least as energetic as nuclear fusion bombs onboard for propulsion. Setting off the propulsion magazine seems like a reasonable thing to do if you want to keep the ship out of enemy hands.