Never read the novel, but somehow I'd find it more interesting if the Black Dragon wasn't the actual target of the device, but nations considered enemies of the country that built it. BD tried to stop the country from activating it, and while that country was losing, they decided to do a hail mary and targeted BD instead of another country. While it didn't kill him, it did cause him to go insane from all the damage that was dealt to him, and thus his rampage against the rest of humanity. Now that it's been several millennia that he's been locked up, his mind has returned to him. But somehow the evil organization had uncovered the truth, and so they are trying to activate the device once more to make BD go mad and destroy the world once again.