Anyone remember how in the First Doctor serial The Tenth Planet, Earth technology included a powerful bomb called a Z-bomb, potentially devastating enough to blow up an entire planet? Could this have been linked in any way to the Osterhagen Project in Journey's End, implied to have been started decades prior to the 2000s?
Z-bombs
- Thread starter EJA
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Linked possibly, but the Osterhaagen weapon was clearly stated as a series of nuclear weapons placed to shatter the crust of the planet or somesuch. The Z-bomb (almost unimaginedly so, as the opposite of that "A-Bomb" thing that was so new and scary even in the 60s) was probably just a generic end-of-world construct. Anyway, IMO if you subscribe to RTD's postulate of non-timelocked events, the whole Mondasian invasion (or two, if you count the one in "The Invasion") may have been un-happened by the time of the more recent Dalek invasion(s).
Mark
Mark
And yet, save for a curios in Henry's basement (which itself may have been undone by subsequent events), we've seen none...
Mark
Mark
That sucks.
I'd say that the Osterhagen project quite probably used Z-Bombs, there just wasn't any point in mentioning that specifically (and Z-bomb may have been a name for a particular design of warhead that's been replaced in the following 20 years).
In Tenth Planet (novelisation quoted), General Cutler says "It is a bomb that could, if timed rightly, split this planet of ours right in half. Two or three of them are positioned in strategic points around the globe." It's no big stretch to imagine that Cutler means the z-bomb has to be used against certain weak points in the crust to serve as a planet-buster, like the Osterhagen set-up..
In Tenth Planet (novelisation quoted), General Cutler says "It is a bomb that could, if timed rightly, split this planet of ours right in half. Two or three of them are positioned in strategic points around the globe." It's no big stretch to imagine that Cutler means the z-bomb has to be used against certain weak points in the crust to serve as a planet-buster, like the Osterhagen set-up..
It certainly sounds a lot like the Osterhagen Project. But then Cutler wants to use the Z-bomb to destroy Mondas, implying it's capable of being launched into space, which would be a bit awkward for the Osterhagen bombs, considering they're buried miles underneath the Earth's crust.
And doesn't the elderly German woman in The Stolen Earth/Journey's End imply that the Osterhagen Project was started decades ago, when she was still a young woman? This would mean that the Project and the Z-bombs both existed at the same time.
Maybe in one of the Doctor's adventures, the person who invented the Z-bomb in the 1980s was accidentally killed before he could lay the groundwork for the device, and to make sure history followed its prior course, the Doctor then blew Mondas up himself? It's just an idea.
Maybe in one of the Doctor's adventures, the person who invented the Z-bomb in the 1980s was accidentally killed before he could lay the groundwork for the device, and to make sure history followed its prior course, the Doctor then blew Mondas up himself? It's just an idea.
I think this is reaching a bit. The Osterhagen key according to the wikipedia article "List of Doctor Who items" is a priming device for 25 nuclear warheads strategically placed beneath the Earth's crust for use at a time when Earth's destruction is preferable to the alternative. (I believe Martha uses this quote to describe it to the Doctor when he asks her what it is). For UNIT to have started this project on this grand a scale they would have needed to start sometime in the past. I suppose that it is possible that the nukes could be tipped with z-bombs but that wouldn't have been necessary really. I'm not really sure at how reconciling the Osterhagen Key with z-bombs and linking the two episodes makes this at all more enjoyable.
Good points: Cutler talks about them having the Z-Bomb and the means to deliver it on the Demeter rocket, and some of the dialogue makes it sound as if they're compatible, but not normally set up together. Certainly, much of episode three is spent mating the z-bomb warhead to the Demeter booster.
I'd hazard that Snowcap had both systems for different reasons, but there was always the option of using them together. And the elderly German woman? Well, she'd have been 22 years younger in Tenth Planet (2008/1986), and the project could have been in development before that (with the z-bomb deployment as an interim measure).
Admiral Young: Yep, the key triggers the bombs buried in the crust. They could be z-bombs, they could not be... it's left open for fans to make the connection (to a planet-buster in an earlier story) if they want.
I suppose the German woman could have been an early overseeer of the project before she took up her guard post.
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