Questions tagged [weapon-mass-destruction]
For questions that deal with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
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The opposite to Worldbuilding: World Destruction
I am looking at different ways to destroy a planet - because a society within my setting wants to destroy a planet. I am assuming the planet is of a similar size and composition to the Earth just to ...
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How to prevent superluminal traveling idiots from wrecking half of the universe?
Linked but not a duplicate of this question.
An example of the problem
During the last Star-Wars movie, I was dumbfounded by the sheer stupidity of admiral Holdo's move, during this particularly ...
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Is it possible to kill all life on Earth?
Edit: It has been suggested that my question is a duplicate of What could humans do to render the earth uninhabitable?. That question only asks what would be necessary to make human life impossible. ...
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How to completely destroy a city, without leaving clues for humanity 4,000 years later?
Background
I want to burn down a city completely. Nothing must remain, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Even though I'm a supernatural being, I want this to happen in a natural way. I also want the ...
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How to be hidden from world for a year
Question inspired by a book I just finished: Dan Brown's Inferno
Suppose I am a wealthy billionaire who wants to hide from the outside world for a year.
Plot twist is, that the world's anti-...
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What are the safety margins for destroying a planet from space?
My empire's flagship, the Persecutor class UJBHE1 Abhorrent, rides into the home system of my greatest enemy, Baron Obsequious, levels its Death Ray2 at his beloved home, and pulls the trigger.3 ...
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What weapon of mass destruction could theoretically vaporize a whole solar system?
I'm trying to engineer a scenario where a nation wipes out another's home solar system by vaporizing it into a cloud of gas nearly instantly and it engineers a huge controversy over how it happened ...
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What are the most salient aspects of a decaying world caused by the disappearance of everyone? [closed]
You are a normie on 2019 Earth and suddenly you can't find anybody. You've searched for a few hours, tried spamming out emails, random phone calls - no response. What would be the most jarring ...
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How do spaceship-mounted railguns not destroy the ships firing them?
And I'm not talking about the wimpy 32 MJ kind we have in the real world, I'm talking about the superweapon kind. Anyone familiar with Knights of Sidonia and their flagship's Heavy Mass Cannons will ...
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Building the Death Star with today's tech
I found an interesting Wikipedia article, quoted in an answer here.
I'm looking into writing a story where someone has built a Death Star. The purpose of this craft is important to the story (and the ...
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Feasibility of H.G. Wells' Continuously-Exploding Atomic Bombs
I came across this interesting weapon by H.G. Wells, from his novel, The World Set Free, about a special type of atomic bomb that will explode indefinitely.
Here is a description on Wikipedia:
...
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Space Travel Without Understanding How to Create Atomic Weapons?
I have a universe where humanity has produced various civilizations on multiple planets (and no planet has achieved a single world government); and very few of these countries possess the know-how of ...
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How much time does Earth need to repel interstellar attack?
Highly inspired by How would we fare against an interstellar RKKV Attack?
Lets repeat the setup of the original question:
In this hypothetical scenario, in the present day, astronomers detect an ...
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Reformatting Death Stars as powerful telescopes
I think the Hubble telescope is too small to observe the universe. Ditto for James Webb, Keck and other telescopes out there. I decided I need something much bigger.
So, I recently got two Death ...
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How deep underwater do I have to dive to be safe from a 1MT Hydrogen bomb detonation above?
It's just my typical luck: I discover and recover the billion-dollars worth of gold on a sunken galleon on the same day my arch-nemesis decides to detonate a one Megaton hydrogen bomb right above my ...
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How can I destroy a great deal of infrastructure without killing many people?
In the world I'm building, an antagonist desires to cripple humankind down to simple-living status. To do this, the antagonist has to remove all modern infrastructure. This includes buildings, ...
user44399
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Killing the majority of humanity for ecological reasons
There are a number of movies, books and TV shows where the villain wants to kill nearly everyone on the planet because of ecological concerns: there are too many humans, we're using the global ...
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What would be the quickest way to sterilize a planet from several light-years away?
I'm thinking of a couple main ways, but they seem pretty unreliable for complete sterilization. I'm imaging a pretty reclusive hermit civilization around their solar system. They see intelligent life ...
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Shooting an energy beam into the Sun (from the Earth) in order to destroy it
This question is about a fictional scenario where an evil suicidal scientist has built a high-energy weapon somewhere on earth. His intention is to shoot a beam of some form of energy (or high-energy ...
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How far would I have to be from a nuclear detonation in space in order to survive it?
Assume someone detonates a Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb in space. Since in space there's no air, the bomb will behave differently than on Earth. In particular, there will not be an air pressure wave, ...
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What is the Maximum Possible Destruction from One Keystroke? [closed]
You have unlimited access to all of the world's information. Source code, books, electronic information, monuments with text on them, tattoos with text, you name it. If it has information encoded has ...
user53870
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How long after a global nuclear disaster would the world become habitable by humans again?
So at some point in the future, humans have small colonies on the Moon, on Mars and many space stations in orbit of all the planets in the solar system. Everything is going great until one day ...
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Using Polonium in a WMD
A gram of vaporized polonium can kill more than a million people and thus is the most potent poison known to Man. Having read this article, my crazy dictator immediately assembled the most experienced ...
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A 1 kilometre wide sphere of U-235 appears in an orbit around our planet. What happens?
Let's suppose that after seeing aliens get portrayed negatively in science fiction and wishing to end the discrimination, the ancient H'andh'wh'a'vians decide to destroy Earth and humanity.
As they ...
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Is there an organism or chemical substance capable of petrifying humans?
As part of a project, I am exploring a fictional biological/chemical weapon that can rapidly (and indiscriminately) kill by way of petrification.
To clarify,
By petrification, I’m not necessarily ...
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How would we fare against an interstellar RKKV Attack? [closed]
In this hypothetical scenario, in the present day, astronomers detect an object entering the heliosphere, at a distance of roughly 90AU, from the direction of the Proxima Centauri system. Observations ...
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Deep Space bomber - Best bomb against Interstellar warship that is kilometers long in size
We have two opposing forces: the Democrats and the Imperialists.
Each one can field an armada of ships numbering millions in their fleets, supported by trillions- to a quadrillion person strong super ...
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Restricting antimatter - practical rather than legal measures
Antimatter is relatively easy, but heinously expensive, to make using modern technology. I have two universes with the same problem; energy is free and for all practical purposes infinite, this should ...
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Could a Weapon of Mass Destruction, targeting only humans, be developed?
Specifically, if deployed on a town. The buildings, animals (flora and fauna) would be completely untouched, but not a single human would survive the blow.
Secondly, if this is possible, what gene, ...
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What sorts of powers would a superhero and supervillain need to (inadvertently) be knocking down skyscrapers?
A seminal event in a story I'm working on requires a tragedy that will kill hundreds (or maybe even low thousands) of innocent bystanders. This occurs in a large American city (I haven't chosen one ...
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Can I grow a banana that will produce mushroom cloud?
There is a trace of radioactive isotope of potassium found in every bananas, I'm curious can I grow a banana which is rich in heavier unstable elements so that I can harvest and threaten my neighbor? (...
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Any realistic ideas for a suction-based weapon?
I’ve been looking for real-life examples of suction-based weapons or weapons that work like a vacuum, violently sucking up the surrounding matter, but my search hasn’t generated any decent results. ...
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How could hackers cause mass destruction to major cities using existing satellites?
Set in the modern day, I was wondering about a possible scenario in which some hackers gain control of many satellites, probably including those specifically for defense purposes, in order to wreak ...
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Mostly realistic weapons to assault a planet from orbit
I'm looking for a few weapons which I can use to attack a planet from orbit.
I'm not looking to destroy it or make it uninhabitable, just wreck a few things until the occupants stop launching anti-...
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How can I kill off 75-90% of humanity by a non-biological weapon, but leave structures standing?
I'm making a world where approximately 75-90% of humanity was taken out by a non-biological weapon (i.e., no viruses or bacteria), but the majority of major structures, such as tall buildings, exist ...
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How long would it take for a liquified surface of the planet to stop visibly glowing?
In my story one faction in the past used it's Dyson Spheres (they have several) to make a Nicol-Dyson beam (Basically you temporarily redirect a significant portion, or even all of it, of the star's ...
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Why might a Death Star laser be red? [closed]
In the distant future, the Earth Federation decided to turn our Moon into a Death Star which has a powerful laser cannon which produces a high energy laser beam capable of obliterating a terrestrial ...
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What would happen to a modern skyscraper if it rains micro blackholes?
Set in present day New York City, an unknown spacecraft of alien origin expelled millions of micro blackholes each with the mass of a grape in the earth atmosphere. I like to know what happens if ...
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How to ignite the atmosphere?
Before the first nuclear weapon was dropped, a scientist (whose name has escaped me) had a thought: could it ignite the atmosphere? But this was during World War II, when they didn't have the maths it ...
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Klemperer rosette vs Relativistic Kill Vehicles
In the book The Killing Star, Relativistic Kill Vehicles (RKV) are described as the ultimate weapon.
They are described as impossible to stop, so that any civilization that develops them better ...
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What are some sociological or military justifications for localized nuclear warfare?
I'm not talking about world-ending, global-scale thermonuclear war, nor about massive salvos of missiles being fired at countries by other countries. I'm talking about, say, a few divisional-level ...
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Speculative weapon of mass destruction
In near future a global war wipes out most of humanity, leaving only a handful of survivors. Thousands of years later these survivors have adapted to lives in small pockets of the world still left ...
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What would be the outcome of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?
As I asked in Previous Question about the role of countries in the conflict between India and Pakistan and most of the answers suggest that there is less chance of involvement of other countries, I ...
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What kinds of third-world countries would survive nuclear winter?
It’s the mid–late 20th century, and NATO and the Soviet bloc wipe each other out in a nuclear war while the southern hemisphere eats its popcorn. Dust fills the atmosphere and nuclear winter sets in; ...
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Space Mechs or Tanks or Planes or Marines - Fighting in space without blowing up each other's starships
Suppose that there are 2 interstellar empires at war with one another, both armed with FTL drives which cannot be used within a certain radius of huge gravity fields, stars, gas giants, etc. Another ...
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Appearance and effects of a 200 mt fusion bomb explosion on the moon
Let's suppose that a fusion bomb device with a yield of 200 megatons (4x Tsar Bomba) is detonated in Mare Tranquillitatis on the Moon.
My question is:
Would the explosion be visible from Earth at ...
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How much energy does it take to fuse 1m$^3$ of seawater, and how much energy is released by that fusion?
So, assume that you have 1m$^3$ of normal Terran seawater you can adiabatically raise to an arbitrarily high pressure/temperature in situ (say, by compressing it with nuclear shockwaves from all ...
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Fortifications capable of withstanding atmosphere-clearing blast
On the Atomic Rockets site, there is a series of handy tables, the first of which is aptly named "The Boom Table", providing examples for a wide range of energy releases (in both Joules and TNT ...
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Could near light speed space ships be used to destroy a civilization?
I once saw in a reply to a comment to a youtube video, someone suggesting that as a fermi paradox solution, once civilizations get the ability to create near light speed spaceships, a few nutcases are ...
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A form of MAD that doesn't involve a huge amount of nuclear readiness?
In the Cold War the adversaries had huge amounts of nukes, a readiness to deploy these nukes and a second strike capability that assured that in a nuclear war both sides would be destroyed (mutually ...
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