By Selwyn Duke

The threat of nuclear holocaust once figured prominently in our psyches. In the 1950s, schoolchildren did duck-and-cover drills to prepare for atomic attack. The 1983 film The Day After, portraying a nuclear exchange and its hopeless aftermath, terrified audiences and created pressure for disarmament talks. Yet while the Cold War’s end has allayed these fears, the famed “Doomsday Clock” is still the closest to midnight it has ever been: 100 seconds to apocalypse. And one reason why may be what some have dubbed Russia’s “doomsday weapon.”

It’s called Poseidon, and it’s not just the stuff of your grandfather’s atomic nightmares. The average nuclear weapon is a missile-delivered device that could destroy a city and, in the most formidable warheads’ cases, a great deal of area beyond. Poseidon, however, is a huge nuclear torpedo that, some say, could destroy a whole continent.

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