Remember the Osterhagen Key? Did they borrow from The Outer Limits?

[Candleicious Ghost]

I was watching the series where Martha Jones was in this silly thing called the Osterhagen Key which I felt like I had seen somewhere before and I"m watching The Outer Limits and now I know why I felt that way. The episode I am watching is called Dead Man's Switch and it's very much the same kind of thing, so yeah I'm thinking maybe this was one source of an idea for them, and I'm sure there have been similar other stories.

 

[Chaos Descending]

The idea of a Dead Man's Switch didn't originate with the Outer Limits. From the very earliest days of the Nuclear Weapons Age there has been discussion in the US Military about whether it would be desirable to link our nuclear arsenal to some sort of device that would automatically launch pre-programmed nuclear strikes if the absence of certain persistent signals indicated that the United States had already suffered a debilitating nuclear strike. "Officially", the US has no such system in place. I personally agree that the US probably truly has no such system, There has been speculation that Russia (or the USSR) has (or had at one time) such a system, but I think the general consensus is that they likely do not.

But anyway this concept dates back at least to the 1940s when such a system began to be feasible.