Doomsday Devices in Film

One of the most notable is the film Dr. Strangelove, a fairly literal satire of the Cold War. In it, the Soviet Ambassador, upon learning that the Americans could not recall a bomber set to deliver nuclear weapons inside the Soviet Union, informs the President that Soviet Premier Kissoff, unable to afford competing in the nuclear arms race, had ordered the creation of a doomsday device. While the device had been built and activated, its existence had not yet been announced; this was due to come at a Communist Party conference the next week, thereby making it useless as a nuclear deterrent under the circumstances.

Other films have adopted a more fantastical or imaginary approach:

• In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the AΩ cobalt bomb works by igniting the atmosphere.
• In the James Bond movie Moonraker, Sir Hugo Drax creates a doomsday device – a poison dispersed by satellites – to eradicate all human life on earth. Afterwards, he wants to re-inhabit the earth using a colony of "perfect" human beings, orbiting in space while the doomsday device is active.
• Skynet in the Terminator films utilises the United States' stockpile of Nuclear weapons in a bid to end all human life on Earth in an act called Judgment Day by the surviving humans.

Doomsday Devices in Television

• In the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine", a conical planet killer goes on a planet destroying rampage, its projected path threatening "...the very heart of the Federation". Captain Kirk speculates that the machine was created as a doomsday device, and used, thus destroying its creators and then going on a random path of destruction. Also in the Star Trek Universe, Project Genesis, which was designed to create habitable planets from barren moons, was seen as a doomsday weapon by rogue Klingon agents as the device had the ability to destroy existing life on a planet in favor of its own matrix for life.
• In Futurama, Professor Farnsworth is known to possess several doomsday devices, which (ironically) infrequently come in handy for saving the universe.
• In the cartoon series The Flintstones, the character The Great Gazoo is sent to earth as punishment for creating a button which would annihilate the entire universe.
• The final story arc of the animated television series Exosquad is dedicated to the dictator Phaeton's attempt to detonate a doomsday device on Earth as revenge for the destruction of his homeplanet Mars.
• In the ill-fated series finale of Sonic the Hedgehog, Dr. Robotnik created a station called the Doomsday Project, capable of launching saucer-like pods all over Mobius, attacking everyone and everything, forcing them into submission, giving Robotnik his long-awaited total domination. He would've succeeded if it wasn't for Sonic and Sally using the Deep Power Stones.
• In the Gundam SEED Cosmic Era universe, a superweapon called GENESIS, which fires a concentrated burst of gamma radiation from space, was created to bring a decisive end to the Bloody Valentine War by destroying Washington D.C.. A similar weapon, called Neo-GENESIS, appeared in Gundam SEED Destiny.
• "Doomsday is Tomorrow", a two-part episode of The Bionic Woman focused on the protagonist, Jaime Sommers, racing to reverse the activation of a doomsday device triggered by a nuclear weapons test.
• On the pilot episode of Evil Con Carne, Hector built a doomsday device that was destroyed by commandos.
• In the Doctor Who serial The Pirate Planet, the antagonists operate a hollowed out planet which encircles and mines other planets, including inhabited ones, completely destroying them in the process.
• In another Doctor Who arc with the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) - The Stolen Earth and Journey's End (Doctor Who), the Earth is stolen by the Daleks as part of a cosmic "Reality Bomb" which creates a gravitational streamline of Z-Neutrino Energy which cancels out all matter. The Daleks intended to use the bomb to destroy the entire universe down to the sub-atomic level, and indeed destroy all parallel universes as well, thus destroying "all of Creation" other than themselves. At some point in the past during the Nuclear Proliferation years, some person or organisation (possibly UNIT installed strategic nuclear detonation points all over the globe and co-ordinated by Mr Osterhagen (?) - to be used only when the fate of the Human Race is so detrimental that obliteration would be a preferable option to living on. The Osterhagen Key activates those nuclear warheads obliterating the entire planet out of existence.(Osterhagen is an anagram of Earth's Gone)
• In the 2011 season of The Office, Dwight installs a doomsday device as a means of staff accountability.
• The third season of Fringe introduces a Doomsday device, powered by Peter Bishop, which would annihilate both the characters' universe and the alternate universe. Only by stepping into the machine could Bishop then decide which universe would survive.