Dr. Strangelove

As I mentioned in my previous post, Dr. Strangelove does an excellent job of illustrating what can happen as a result of technological differentials. Here we have a rogue commander that sends his bombers to nuke Russia in order to force the US into a preemptive strike, and thus a very quick and devastating war. We find out well into it that the Russians have a "doomsday device" which will release massive amounts of fallout and kill everyone on the surface of the planet. They almost works things out but the Russians can't tamper with the device or else it'll go off and it goes off automatically when a lone plane drops it's payload. The US has greater forces, resources, and technology, so the Russians came up with this thing to use as a deterrent. Unfortunately, as we find out they had yet to tell everyone of this device so in the end it goes off. The technological differential put the Russians in the situation where they were willing to kill everyone on the planet for fear of their own extinction.