  A transition from a smooth torus to a chaotic attractor in quasiperiodically
forced dissipative systems may occur after a finite number of torus-doubling
bifurcations. In this paper we investigate the underlying bifurcational
mechanism which seems to be responsible for the termination of the
torus-doubling cascades on the routes to chaos in invertible maps under
external quasiperiodic forcing. We consider the structure of a vicinity of a
smooth attracting invariant curve (torus) in the quasiperiodically forced Henon
map and characterize it in terms of Lyapunov vectors, which determine
directions of contraction for an element of phase space in a vicinity of the
torus. When the dependence of the Lyapunov vectors upon the angle variable on
the torus is smooth, regular torus-doubling bifurcation takes place. On the
other hand, the onset of non-smooth dependence leads to a new phenomenon
terminating the torus-doubling bifurcation line in the parameter space with the
torus transforming directly into a strange nonchaotic attractor. We argue that
the new phenomenon plays a key role in mechanisms of transition to chaos in
quasiperiodically forced invertible dynamical systems.
