"Hey, wouldn't it be cool to have like, a shoe-phone? Like that Get Smart guy? From the show?"

The Cold War was a terrifying time fraught with tension, murder and the ever-present threat of nuclear war. And in our darkest hour, our world leaders turned to their most esteemed geniuses, their brilliant scientists, their brightest engineers, and asked them one question, one question upon which hung the fate of the world:

6 Umbrella Dart Gun

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Georgi Markov was a pair of freedom-loving bohemian testicles resting gently on the forehead of communist Bulgaria. His writing was winning all sorts of awards and stirring anti-communist movements all across Europe. Clearly, they had to get those balls off their face, and stat. So it was that one day, while Markov was walking to his car in London, he felt a sharp bite on his thigh. When he turned around he saw nothing, only a man who fumbled briefly with an umbrella before running off. The next day he became deathly ill, and died, as one is wont to do when becoming deathly ill. To this day no one has ever been tried for the murder.

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"A man with an umbrella in London? That narrows it down to just half the city."

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The suspected poison, ricin, was cutting edge at the time. It was a top-secret concoction yielded after decades of research in Soviet chemical warfare labs. Scotland Yard was so unfamiliar with this new super-poison that they had to test it on a hapless pig to confirm how it killed. The projectile itself was a modified 1.52 mm jeweler's bearing, normally only used in precision watchmaking. The bullet was relatively harmless to the body, no more damaging than a BB, but the pellet was coated with a special wax that would melt at body temperature, and inside was the new and deadly poison. In fact, the wax worked so covertly that it wasn't actually discovered until investigators found traces on a similar pellet pulled from the body of Bulgarian exile Vladimir Kostov, who suffered, but ultimately lived through the attack.

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The Communists killed dissidents with tiny platinum Death Stars. And, somehow, they lost.

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That's right: This wasn't an isolated incident. Multiple men have been attacked with a poison watch bearing fired by an umbrella, wielded by a certainly Bulgarian, possibly watch-themed super-assassin.

Batman writers, eat your hearts out. (Seriously, do it quick; it's a way nicer death than ricin poisoning, and the Watchman does not take kindly to copyright infringement.)