The Architects of Fear - Precursors

Precursors

• Theodore Sturgeon's story "Unite and Conquer," published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1948, turns on a similar gag, humans uniting against a fake alien threat. Sturgeon used the idea again in "Occam's Scalpel," published in If (magazine) in 1971.
• The Jan/Feb 1951 issue of Weird Science (#5), features the story, "The Last War on Earth," wherein a scientist creates a fake threat from another world - in this instance a "Martian" bomb is dropped on an American suburb, eventually uniting Earth against Mars. The story has a twist ending typical of many Weird Science stories.
• In Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, a fake invasion is carried out to unite Earth and eventually leads to world peace.