In this biting satire, the eastern and western governments have managed an elaborate ruse, wherein each side comes up with increasingly outlandish doomsday weapons — weapons that don’t work.

But when aliens invade, the top designers of each side have to come together to make a real doomsday device, if they don’t kill each other first.

With its combination of romance, espionage, and alien invasion, The Zap Gun skewers the military-industrial complex in a way as relevant today as it was at the height of the Cold War.