What could replace nukes for strategic use

[Todjaeger]

That MOAB is that the old Fuel - Air Bomb under a different name? Didn't the USAF turf one out of the back end of a C130 during the Vietnam War? IIRC the FAB was the biggest non-nuclear blast but I wonder how it would have rated against the 10 ton Grand Slams the Poms used in the latter part of WWII. They modified some Lancaster bombers of 617 Squadron RAF (Dambusters) to carry them and dropped a viaduct in France using them. Drop from on high, things penetrated something like 100ft underground before going bang and created a cavern beneath viaduct supports. Don't know if anything today is capable of carrying them.

No, AFAIK the Vietnam era device you are thinking of was known as the 'Daisycutter', which was actually designed to knock down trees with the blast, creating an instant LZ. The MOAB is designed to be an improvement of the 'Daisycutter' which actually saw some use in GWI against some of the Iraqi bunkers and GBAD.

As for the Grand Slam... During GWI th343 was an ad hoc penetrator bomb developed, which was basically a barrel from the M68 105 mm tank cannon, filled with explosives and capped and both ends. There has since been development work on the MOAP, which is actually a designed to penetrator multiple layers of steel, concrete and sand.

-Cheers

 

[ngatimozart]

No, AFAIK the Vietnam era device you are thinking of was known as the 'Daisycutter', which was actually designed to knock down trees with the blast, creating an instant LZ. The MOAB is designed to be an improvement of the 'Daisycutter' which actually saw some use in GWI against some of the Iraqi bunkers and GBAD.

As for the Grand Slam... During GWI th343 was an ad hoc penetrator bomb developed, which was basically a barrel from the M68 105 mm tank cannon, filled with explosives and capped and both ends. There has since been development work on the MOAP, which is actually a designed to penetrator multiple layers of steel, concrete and sand.

-Cheers

Thanks. Much appreciated.

 

[lucinator]

the daisy cutter was also used in Afghanistan by dropping at the mouth of cave complexes, apparently it was very effective. Also the MOAB is not a fuel air bomb, it uses it's own oxidizer, however it is thermometric.

Also could you potentially just drop a really large container of fuel out of the back of say a C-5 with a ignition source, that should produce a large blast.

 

[rip]

I am pretty sure that the use of any weapon having a hard hitting presence, WMD or not, is going to start a war if used against any nation capable of even remotely defending itself. If that target is not capable of defending itself, why use such a large weapon when smaller, more precise weapons exist that can do the job?

In this day and age of precision strike weaponry, the ONLY use for such a large weapon would be to cause massive damage to multiple targets against an enemy with similar capability. The only reason to form that kind of action would be for a preemptive strategic strike aimed at the destruction of a large amount of the enemies strategic forces before they can be employed. The end result is the same; you are going to start a war so you better get a good hit in first.

I think that you guys are not taking the original question seriously enough. Nuclear weapons are not the be all end all method of mass destruction. There are even greater possibilities far scarier than nuclear explosives. It is just that after nuclear weapons were created there was no need to pursue even more frightening ideas. Not that those ideas haven’t been though up. Nothing mentioned so far on this thread even comes close to the destructive power of nuclear weapons. What has been talked about so far are weapons that are more usable than nuclear weapons.

The weapons mentioned so far are in fact more finely targeted and more limited in scope than even the smallest nuclear device. A better weapon of mass destruction would be one that had far greater effect over greater areas, be unstoppable, and would at the same time be more final targeted with fewer unintended collateral effects and such weapons are in fact are now possible.

 

[lucinator]

I think that you guys are not taking the original question seriously enough. Nuclear weapons are not the be all end all method of mass destruction. There are even greater possibilities far scarier than nuclear explosives. It is just that after nuclear weapons were created there was no need to pursue even more frightening ideas. Not that those ideas haven’t been though up. Nothing mentioned so far on this thread even comes close to the destructive power of nuclear weapons. What has been talked about so far are weapons that are more usable than nuclear weapons.

The weapons mentioned so far are in fact more finely targeted and more limited in scope than even the smallest nuclear device. A better weapon of mass destruction would be one that had far greater effect over greater areas, be unstoppable, and would at the same time be more final targeted with fewer unintended collateral effects and such weapons are in fact are now possible.

actually the original question was "what could be more useable", as you point out we have no need for even stronger weapons, since hydrogen weapons are scalable, you could theoretically build ship sized nukes. We have no real need for more destructive weapons.

 

[kato]

Dust explosions have been responsible for the majority of the biggest accidental bangs in history.

The couple big fertilizer exlosions and the accidental military explosive cookoffs in the 20th century surpassed those little mill explosions around 1900 by far. Largest of these was the Halifax cookoff at 2.9 kt followed by at least three explosions (Oppau 1921, Fauld Explosion, Port Chicago) estimated at around 2 kt TNT equivalent. The 1921 Oppau explosion leveling half of Ludwigshafen city is the only one in that list not using military explosives or rocket fuel but plain old ANFO.

That's not counting the 1969 failed N1 launch, which exploded at up to 6.9 kt energy, since the conversion factors of rocket fuel to TNT equivalent are a bit wonky.

 

[ltdanjuly10]

How about an ICBM with a chemical warhead. Same range and reaction time, potential for casualties. God rods would work as well, maybe radio frequency weapons if they work. But honestly when it comes to deterrence nothing beats nukes. The whole idea of strategic nuclear weapons is that they deter the enemy from using his. If you use a strat nuke, then it just failed its job. The lack of radiation from god rods actually hurts their deference factor since they would be more likely to be used, and apart from bio weapons nothing comes close to the fear factor of nuclear weapons. Bio weapons are even more imprecise than nukes. If your looking for precision and usability than strategic deference weapons are not the area you should be looking in.

 

[My2Cents]

The couple big fertilizer exlosions and the accidental military explosive cookoffs in the 20th century surpassed those little mill explosions around 1900 by far. Largest of these was the Halifax cookoff at 2.9 kt followed by at least three explosions (Oppau 1921, Fauld Explosion, Port Chicago) estimated at around 2 kt TNT equivalent. The 1921 Oppau explosion leveling half of Ludwigshafen city is the only one in that list not using military explosives or rocket fuel but plain old ANFO.

That's not counting the 1969 failed N1 launch, which exploded at up to 6.9 kt energy, since the conversion factors of rocket fuel to TNT equivalent are a bit wonky.

Didn't say they were the biggest, just the majority of the top 1000 biggest accidental explosions.

And the 1921 Oppau Explosion was ammonium nitrate, not ANFO. No fuel oil was involved.

 

[StingrayOZ]

actually the original question was "what could be more useable", as you point out we have no need for even stronger weapons, since hydrogen weapons are scalable, you could theoretically build ship sized nukes. We have no real need for more destructive weapons.

The Tsar bomb could have been scaled up to 100Mt with minor modifications. But it was pointless even at 50Mt. In fact if you look up development and revoluitionary designs in nuclear weapons it all happened in about 10-15 years. It then became pointless, you could lob several (a dozen?) near megaton devices in a single ICBM. A single missile doesn't really need to be more powerful than that. It would completely level a large modern city and outlying areas as a single device with redundancy. If humans really wanted we could proberly build a single device in the gigaton range, but it would be utterly pointless as it would be far more economical to deploy multiple warheads with a far greater energy than a single device.

Large Thermobaric bombs offer tactical nuke levels of destruction. But do we really need to level entire cities with a single bomb? With smart weaponry being so cheap and avalible the need for nuclear weapons is decreasing.

Actually rocket explosions would be right up there. I wonder how destructive a stage 1 saturn V rocket would be topped with 200+t of thermobaric high explosives. Actually a rocket is basically a thermobaric bomb, its just designed to use its fuel very slowly (minutes) instead of quickly (less than a second).

 

[Rickyrab]

Large Thermobaric bombs offer tactical nuke levels of destruction. But do we really need to level entire cities with a single bomb? With smart weaponry being so cheap and avalible the need for nuclear weapons is decreasing.

The real question here is: Do we really need to level entire cities?

Back during WWII there were numerous attempts to hit and wreck civilian targets, some of which succeeded. Incendiaries were dropped with the intent of leveling cities, and Hitler (at various points in the war) is said to have wanted Warsaw, Leningrad, and Paris destroyed.

I suspect that if a genocidal madman like Hitler had nukes, and was unopposed, he'd use them against whomever he felt like committing genocide against.

 

[ngatimozart]

The Tsar bomb could have been scaled up to 100Mt with minor modifications. But it was pointless even at 50Mt. In fact if you look up development and revoluitionary designs in nuclear weapons it all happened in about 10-15 years. It then became pointless, you could lob several (a dozen?) near megaton devices in a single ICBM. A single missile doesn't really need to be more powerful than that. It would completely level a large modern city and outlying areas as a single device with redundancy. If humans really wanted we could proberly build a single device in the gigaton range, but it would be utterly pointless as it would be far more economical to deploy multiple warheads with a far greater energy than a single device.

Large Thermobaric bombs offer tactical nuke levels of destruction. But do we really need to level entire cities with a single bomb? With smart weaponry being so cheap and avalible the need for nuclear weapons is decreasing.

Actually rocket explosions would be right up there. I wonder how destructive a stage 1 saturn V rocket would be topped with 200+t of thermobaric high explosives. Actually a rocket is basically a thermobaric bomb, its just designed to use its fuel very slowly (minutes) instead of quickly (less than a second).

There is a relatively nondestructive nuke, the enhanced radiation warhead (neutron bomb), that had a low destructive yield but a very high short term radiation yield that basically kills all organic life forms but leaves the structures mostly intact. IIRC a 1970s tactical weapon. You could insert your ground forces about 3 hours after detonation.

With regard to the thermobaric weapons a Saturn 1 first stage would be impressive, but I wonder how would the first stage from a Saturn 5 go or the first stage from the big Russian booster?

 

[StingrayOZ]

I sometimes wonder how you could use a massive space rocket as a weapon. You generally come to the conclusion its better to build many smaller than 1 large. Unless you can fit some new tech on the large. Antimatter or blackhole etc..

I have my doubts about how effective a neutron bomb would have been, I think there may have been a lot of secondary isotopes formed with all those neutrons flying about hitting, splitting and being captured.

 

[My2Cents]

There is a relatively nondestructive nuke, the enhanced radiation warhead (neutron bomb), that had a low destructive yield but a very high short term radiation yield that basically kills all organic life forms but leaves the structures mostly intact. IIRC a 1970s tactical weapon. You could insert your ground forces about 3 hours after detonation.

That depends on the definition of ‘relative’. The enhanced radiation bomb radiation effects would deliver an incapacitating radiation dose to the crew of a 1970’s style tank at about the same distance that it would be killing infantry with blast and thermal pulse effects. You could work closer to things you wanted to save because of the lower explosive yields, but if the weapon was close enough to kill the enemy troops occupying a structure by neutron effects, that structure was toast.

Modern tank armor is much more effective against neutron radiation than the RHA steel used in the 1970s, mainly as a byproduct of lighter elements incorporated into the designs, so the usefulness of enhanced radiation warheads on the battlefield is probably past and done with.

 

[lucinator]

There is a relatively nondestructive nuke, the enhanced radiation warhead (neutron bomb), that had a low destructive yield but a very high short term radiation yield that basically kills all organic life forms but leaves the structures mostly intact. IIRC a 1970s tactical weapon. You could insert your ground forces about 3 hours after detonation.

neutron bombs were not as low destruction as you may think. They generally were the same bast as a standard battlefield nuke, the difference was that within the blast radius it could deliver enough radiation to kill people who would normally have survived the blast, i.e. tank crews. The idea that it could leave structures intact is mostly fiction.

 

[kato]

They generally were the same bast as a standard battlefield nuke

Nah, they weren't. W70-3 (Lance) was 1 kt, W79-0 (203mm) was dialable 0.1 to 1.1 kt.

Effective battlefield tactical nukes without ER functionality like the W33 203mm shell were dialable from 0.5 to 40 kt, airdropped tactical nukes typically started at 50-100 kt at that point in time. The only common tactical nuke with less yield was the W48 155mm shell at around 0.1 kt, but its numbers in the field were far less than for W33 and bigger systems.

the difference was that within the blast radius it could deliver enough radiation to kill people who would normally have survived the blast, i.e. tank crews.

Actually, that's only the case if both bombs were exploded at optimum altitude in an airburst. This is not the case for artillery shells though - in particular the W79-0 could be contact fuzed, exploding at ground level and therefore - in comparison to an airburst - minimizing its physical blast range, while still irradiating people within virtually the same range as if using a time-fuzed airburst.

 

[rip]

Nah, they weren't. W70-3 (Lance) was 1 kt, W79-0 (203mm) was dialable 0.1 to 1.1 kt.

Effective battlefield tactical nukes without ER functionality like the W33 203mm shell were dialable from 0.5 to 40 kt, airdropped tactical nukes typically started at 50-100 kt at that point in time. The only common tactical nuke with less yield was the W48 155mm shell at around 0.1 kt, but its numbers in the field were far less than for W33 and bigger systems.


Actually, that's only the case if both bombs were exploded at optimum altitude in an airburst. This is not the case for artillery shells though - in particular the W79-0 could be contact fuzed, exploding at ground level and therefore - in comparison to an airburst - minimizing its physical blast range, while still irradiating people within virtually the same range as if using a time-fuzed airburst.

Nuclear weapons were in fact made much smaller than you state but they were designed for air to air and ground to air missiles. For ground use, in a tactical since, there were already conventional weapons to address all the lower yield requirements so there was no reason to produce them. It wasn’t that they couldn’t make them smaller.

 

[kato]

Nuclear weapons were in fact made much smaller than you state but they were designed for air to air and ground to air missiles.

No there weren't. US air-to-air and ground-to-air:

W54 (GAR-11/AIM-26): 0.25 kt yield
W25 (AIR-2): 1.5 kt yield
W66 (SPRINT): several kilotons, undisclosed, neutron ER
W7 (NIKE HERCULES): 2.5 to 28 kt
W31 (NIKE HERCULES): 2 to 30 kt
W71 (SPARTAN): 5 MT, thermal X-ray ER

The only system with a smaller yield than the W48's planned 0.1 kt, actual 0.072 kt was the Mk-54, first used in the M388, later in SADM (at minimum yield 0.01 kt). However quite definitely neither M388 nor SADM were "standard battlefield nukes".

In particular not when neutron bombs were around, the Mk-54 was long retired at that point (SADM was retired around the time the W48 was introduced). Of course the same goes for most of the above systems. If we talk neutron bomb comparison to contemporary fission-only nukes we're talking 1980. Not 1960.

there were already conventional weapons to address all the lower yield requirements

As of 1980, there was no system covering the gap between the BLU-82 (11 ton TNT blast equivalent) and the W48 (72 tons TNT equivalent in testing, 100 tons planned). The BLU-82 also wasn't considered a tactical weapon, but rather a strategic system. And that's a rather wide gap actually. It was only covered in the last gap by introducing the MOAB (at 44 tons TNT blast equivalent).

 

[Beatmaster]

Imo there is not a single weapon on the planet that i know of that has such direct and indirect effect both in a fysic and on a psy way as a nuke.
Not to mention the long term effect on the target itself and miles around it.
Simply said a nuke and its payload / effects are way to big to be directly replaced for a weapon with similair effect.
Some mentioned a EMP weapon, Some a railgun and Some mentioned other weapons like orbital bombardment.
However with the current tech we would not be able to produce a weapon similair to a nuke.
Personally speaking it would be nice to find a weapon that does not have all the nasty side effects as a nuke....
So in that regard any future weapon that might replace the nuke someday is either going to be much more powerfull and perhaps even more ugly or its going to be alot smaller and less destructive as we are talking here about a nuke which has so much destructive power that its going to be very hard to come up with a replacement.
Obviously orbital bombardment might be one type of tech that has the potential to be equally destructive but carries less after effects depending on the type of damage being done and systems used to achieve such a goal.
Perhaps a weard example but we all know the Game C&C where the GDI has a particle cannon, now i know this sounds pretty weard and science fiction but on the otherhand a orbital cannon (Or similair system) would theoretical be able to use laser tech to destroy a specific target (Or multiple targets at ones) which would be capable of doing serious damage to civ-mil hardware, bases or civ and mil production plants.
So theoretical speaking you could destroy very specific but vital targets with little or no warning while still having a similair effect as a nuke.
And in that way stop the war making capabilities of a nation, or at least serious damage it not to mention it could theoretical be used to destroy all comminucations which is a really serious blow to any nation given todays dependansy to high tech systems.
Just a idea.

Ps sorry for spelling errors.

 

[ngatimozart]

Imo there is not a single weapon on the planet that i know of that has such direct and indirect effect both in a fysic and on a psy way as a nuke.
Not to mention the long term effect on the target itself and miles around it.
Simply said a nuke and its payload / effects are way to big to be directly replaced for a weapon with similair effect.
Some mentioned a EMP weapon, Some a railgun and Some mentioned other weapons like orbital bombardment.
However with the current tech we would not be able to produce a weapon similair to a nuke.
Personally speaking it would be nice to find a weapon that does not have all the nasty side effects as a nuke....
So in that regard any future weapon that might replace the nuke someday is either going to be much more powerfull and perhaps even more ugly or its going to be alot smaller and less destructive as we are talking here about a nuke which has so much destructive power that its going to be very hard to come up with a replacement.
Obviously orbital bombardment might be one type of tech that has the potential to be equally destructive but carries less after effects depending on the type of damage being done and systems used to achieve such a goal.
Perhaps a weard example but we all know the Game C&C where the GDI has a particle cannon, now i know this sounds pretty weard and science fiction but on the otherhand a orbital cannon (Or similair system) would theoretical be able to use laser tech to destroy a specific target (Or multiple targets at ones) which would be capable of doing serious damage to civ-mil hardware, bases or civ and mil production plants.
So theoretical speaking you could destroy very specific but vital targets with little or no warning while still having a similair effect as a nuke.
And in that way stop the war making capabilities of a nation, or at least serious damage it not to mention it could theoretical be used to destroy all comminucations which is a really serious blow to any nation given todays dependansy to high tech systems.
Just a idea.

Ps sorry for spelling errors.

An orbital bombardment system is not so far fetched. It would be a kinetic weapon, i.e., no warhead. The velocity of its impact would be the destructive agent and it would not have to be a large projectile. Take an old satellite, put a rocket on it aim it and fire the rocket and sattelite at the target. You have a high velocity projectile with a mass that will reach the target in the order of say 100 - 500kg maybe a tonne, travelling at say Mach 20+. I'm not an astrophysicists so I'm guessing, but end result is a mightily impressive explosion because you have that mass travelling at high speed coming to a sudden stop. All the kinetic energy is very quickly liberated. Thing is the technology is available today and there is plenty of orbital junk up there. In future bring in rocks from Asteroid Belt anything up to 1km diameter will be a continental wide event maybe an ELE if you got it wrong.

 

[rip]

You guys have not come up with something that is more terrible than nuclear weapons and is at the same time more usable in war than they are. As I said before, there are things more terrible than nucleus weapons. So I will give you just one, directed artificial life. Directed Artificial life is similar to but not the same as biologic weapons.

There are many reasons that biologic weapons are not very usable though they are terrible. First, they are not vey discriminate as to recognizing who is or is not the enemy. Two, they often come back and hit you own people. Three, the enemy can always retaliate in kind. Four, they are almost imposable to neutralize after hostilities are over and can persist literally, forever. Six, is that the propaganda and moral aftermaths are so great. Assuming you still want to live in the world after the war is over, win or lose.

The solution is to create a new form of artificial life not found on Earth. One created in the laboratory, it would not use DNA or RNA as its information carrying or transcription molecules though it could still use other components of natural biologic systems. This is important. One of the reasons that biologic weapons are not useful is that they are base based upon a system of information retention, replication, and propagation (chaotic) that is not only susceptible to mutation but in fact counts on it as a method of adapting to new environmental circumstances that otherwise would terminate it. DNA does not want to be terminated.

One of the methods by which it does this, especially in microscopic life forms, is that they will exchange DNA sequences with other organisms within their environment building up their viability. In an artificial life form created from scratch there will be no wild forms for it to interact with in this uncontrolled manner. All so,all natural informational sequences always have inactive sequences within them as a product of being a chaotic system verses a fixed designed one. The junk DNA that which is not normally active within the genome is however, still available to becoming active or partially active, this too has a tendency to make the genome unstable and thus uncontrolled. A designed system would, if designed correctly, however not work even if just one instruction was misspelled and so would then self-terminate.

A designed system could be instructed to replicate a fixed number of times and then self-terminate so as to become inactive after its usefulness was over. It could be designed in such a way that if it encountered another artificial life form that was defective, "defined as one that is not behaving as it was programed to do", it would act to actively destroy it, as another safety feature.

Now to the issue of specificity, just because it does not use DNA or RNA does not mean that is could not be made to read DNA sequences and identify certain phenotypes. If you select only specific DNA sequence to trigger its kill mode, you can not only targets specific species but also identifiable sub groups within that species. This could be used to attack food sources or even more monstrously, certain races of people as identified by their common phenotypes.

These phenotypes are ready known and are in data bases right now. There is always some part of any population which are atypical. So it wouldn’t kill every one of the targeted sub-group but easily 80% to 95%. Also it would still kill some of you own people if there was not a way of giving it an off switch. This could be done by programing it to identify a certain antibody in the blood. A specific antibody made in the human body as a response to a harmless protein which is not found within nature this will be your kill switch. When you inoculate your population for all of the regular diseases you just include this protein without anyone knowing about it. The body makes antibodies to all proteins that are not of the body itself and they circulate within the blood to act not as an antibody normally would, but to be identified as an off switch.

Artificial cells have already been created in the laboratory. They used DNA like molecules but there are other easier choices. When this line of research is pursued and it will, for very practical industrial reasons. It will be pursued for the very same safety reasons that biological weapon are so feared but to still do the things that biologic systems do so easily and cheaply. Everything I have proposed will be not only possible but inevitable.

Welcome to the new world!