There ceratainly do exist secure USB drives that will “self destruct” (in the sense of destroying all stored data) if the wrong password is used to try and access it more than a certain number of times, or if attempts are made to breach its security.
Here’s one:
The principal of destroying things goes back to scuttling of ships, and thus has a history centuries old. Secret messages sealed in sandwiches of lead to make them drop out of reach were used in Napoleonic days.
The first use of a “self destruct” device in a movie I know of was in Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Unlike later uses of the trope, where the ship was spectacuilarly destroyed to kill a monster or something, this was woinderfully low-key, with the main character “scutytling” his out-of-reac h orbiting ship to prevent interlopers from knowing of his presence, and the explosion was just a bright dot that happened far away.
There was a science fiction TV movie called Something is Out There many years ago, in which a man and a humanoid alien woman are dealing with a non-humanoid alien bad guy on her space ship. There was a wonderful piece of dialogue:
Human Guy: Doesn’t this ship has a Self Destruct system on it?
Alien Woman: Why would we have something like that on board? It doesn’t make any sense.
This is from the original two-part “miniseries”, before they tried to turn it into a series
I could, however, understand having something like that to “scuttle” a ship if it became necessary (like it ends up out of orbit, and might plunge into a heavily inhabited area, and you could somehow guarantee that it would break into bite-sized pieces that burned up on entry, instead of a single huge meteor that would take out a neighborhood).
The poison he used to cheat the hangman was supplied to him by an Allied soldier, who gave him a pen. He thought it contained notes from a German girl to Goring, as it had on previous occasions. But this time it had inside a glass capsule (not a ‘pill’) containing cyanide.
While you have a lot of good information here, once the Stinger is fired and flying, there is a self-destruct timer that blows the warhead if no target is struck with an impact fuse, 15 to 19 seconds after launch. Cite: Chapter 2-3 of the LAAD Handbook, handily hosted by FAS.org as a PDF here.
UncleBill
MOS 7204
2nd LAAD Bn, MCAS Cherry Point
1990-1992
I just heard a thing on NPR about new smart phones being developed for the military. In order to keep them from falling into enemy hands, it sounds like they have a real live self destruct feature–not just a software wipe, which was mentioned specifically, but a vaguely described “vapor” option that, it was implied, would physically destroy the phone (at least in part).
For “Star Trek”, if your ship is powered by a carefully-contained antimatter reactor, simply turning off antimatter containment would blow your ship to atoms. This is why every starship in Star Trek had a self-destruct sequence.
Real-life widgets don’t tend to be powered by antimatter.
Self-destruct stingers?
That would be honeybees. Mutual assured destruction.
Another weird and annoying movie trope, is the “do not disturb” configuration on a bomb planted on a bus or a train (or an airplane). A bomb that goes off it it’s moved, in a setting that is constantly shaken up? It makes sense if placed in a building…
A rather mundane real world example: My mid 90’s era Toyota had stickers on the window warning that the radio would cease to function if removed. And while I never removed it to verify if it actually did self-destruct, I did fantasize about it exploding in the hands of a would-be thief.
NASA had destruction mechanisms in the early days of the space program, when they were using unmanned rockets. If the rockets started behaving erratically it could be blown up (and some were) so it would end up falling into the ocean and not heading for a populated area. I’m pretty sure that’s where the entire “self-destruct” meme originated.
