Other Weapons of Mass Destruction

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doggtag RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/4/2004 1:31:00 AM

Exactly where would engineered nanotechnology machines fall? Technically, they aren't biological, chemical, or nuclear. But if some rogue corporation in the future leaked the designs of a self-replicating device that could be programmed to kill a person horrifically from the inside out, technically it could become more deadly than any other known biological pathogen. Exactly how do you counter billions, even trillions, of nanobots that can think and adapt at computer speeds? .

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Roman RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/4/2004 1:41:09 AM

doggtag, yes, if such a weapon could be devised and built it would definitely qualify as a new type of WMD.

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bsl RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/4/2004 7:38:59 PM

1 Liquid Natural Gas tanker 1 Can opener 1 match

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Roman RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/7/2004 4:08:44 PM

Well, yes bsl, the effect would be the same as a true WMD, but you know what I meant...

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Yimmy RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/7/2004 6:35:59 PM

I am no scientist, but plasma bombs are possible to build.. not with todays technlogy, but in the future... the technology already exists in the labratory. No idea how big bangs they make mind... :DD

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Roman RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/7/2004 7:11:51 PM

Yimmy, what are plasma bombs - I have never heard of them. How do they work?

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doggtag RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/7/2004 8:31:31 PM

bsl is on to something there: several years back, one of my short stories (scifi warfare) proposed a method of defeating an enemy's "death clouds", which were composed of micro-electromechanical machines (MEMS) designed to render men and equipment into their constituent components (turning troops into soup and tanks into heaps of rapidly rusting metal.) My proposal for the good guys was detonating several 100,000 liter tanks of alcohol (created by biomass reactors): the enemies were trying to secure the alcohol for fuel by using the MEM death clouds to remove the good side's security forces guarding the tanks, but the good guys set up biological-mimicking decoys (to appear to the MEMS that living troops were there), but they really withdrew, and detonated all 20 fuel tanks (in reality, this would have been a spectacular fireball, which in the story, consumed a vast amount of the small valley the tanks were hidden in, as well as the death cloud, and eventually several thousand acres of forest.) Overkill, certainly. But I determined (by the storyline) that the risk of the MEMS escaping into a city like a plague of all-consuming mechanical locusts and slaughtering the general population justified sacrificing the 2,000,000 liters of fuel and several thousands acres of trees.) Consider it using one WMD against another. But I still would've like to physically seen (more than just in my imagination) the effect of the biggest fuel-air bomb ever devised. (I based the idea from an occurence during the massive midwest floods in the US in Spring 1993, where a 51-tank propane farm near St Loius was in jeopardy from the rising flood waters. They were afraid that if any of the tanks floated off their foundations and ruptured, the resulting fireball of the 51 (chain reaction) 50,000 gallon tanks would've fed a firestorm over a mile across.) We also got into a debate elsewhere here on SP about someone suggesting an oil supertanker being detonated as a fuel-air bomb, but we weren't in agreement that a large enough explosion could be created to vaporize that much oil into an aerosol form before igniting it. Then someone suggested a low yield nuke...but that would have instantly incinerated a majority of the ship and all its contents (in my short story, I proposed strings of claymore-type charges to burst the tanks before an incendiary charge ignited the fuel.).

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bsl RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/7/2004 10:54:43 PM

My extremely scantly recollection of chemistry suggests that alcohol would make a poor bomb for a variety of reasons. I suggest a LNG tanker because it provides a really huge amount of gas, in a form which, if breached or opened, would tend, on it's own, to vaporize and spread, dispersing slowly, and which could form a kind of fuel-air explosive covering a significant portion of a city before it explodes. This was a topic of some contention about 25 years ago, when I studied strategic warfare. Some of us felt that LNG tankers might be turned into titanic bombs. Others argued that creating the optimal conditions, in practice, was unlikely. I was never especially assured the other side was right. A suboptimal event might still take out half a city. The sort of event I'm referring to involves capture of an LNG tanker in a major port city. If one looks at a map, it turns out that a lot of very large and important cities in America and Europe are either ocean or river ports.

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Shirrush RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/25/2004 9:03:02 AM

Well, yes, of course, large flame weapons would be tremendous WMD's. To create a big explosion, or a deflagration, rather than just a large, hot fire, from a a LNG/LPG tank would require helping it a little bit to vaporize prior to igniting it. Maybe,dropping a bubbling a LOx tank into a gas station's gasoline storage cistern would create a nice release of heat and overpressure too. As to the totally whacky possibility of a WMD to end all WMD's, just go to link This is seriously scary stuff, and even if indeed it is a figment of Mr. Bearden's imagination, it is a genuinely brilliant one.

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Yimmy RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 10/25/2004 9:22:26 AM

"Yimmy, what are plasma bombs - I have never heard of them. How do they work?" *Shrugs* I have only ever heard of them, I don't know much about them..

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elcid RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 1/25/2005 5:52:15 AM

R should be DELETED from the list. Radiological weapons are neither military weapons (they have some value as terrorist weapons) nor are they able to kill MASSES as the term requires.

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Nanheyangrouchuan RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 2/8/2005 12:21:10 PM

A MEM cloud might be vulnerable to easily generated EM pulse weapons, or even using supercharged radar as a countermeasure. My idea for a WMD would be a "SuperNova bomb". A device creates an ultrasmall point of near-infinite density, matter from all around is sucked in until critical mass is breached, resulting in a "supernova" of ordinary matter. The size of the explosion would be determined by the amount of matter drawn in by the "gravity point". You are always gauranteed a big bang because the gravity point would pull in matter until critical mass is reached.

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Roman RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 2/8/2005 10:16:09 PM

Heh, Nahey, but why would it explode at critical density? Of course, it would not need to - the suction would be destructive enough. What you describe sounds as something in between a black hole and a qasar, the latter of which I have no good idea how it operates and extracts energy that it emits. As to EM pulse - that is a very good point - that could destroy nanobots and similar weapons. I suppose even chemical-explosive weapons can be WMDs if enough explosive material is packed in. I am also guessing that WMDs could be created out of many principles of explosive high energy physics - you obviously have nuclear weapons (radioactive decay or perhaps even absorbtion, changing energy levels of nuclei, fission and fusion), you could in principle have anti-matter weapons, the gravity energy weapons, and who knows what else - I have no clue what would happen if you split (or opposite - fuse the quarks and gluons) a proton or a neutron into its component quarks and gluons - after all splitting the nucleus was also difficult, but turned out to release vast amounts of energy. Any other high energy physics ideas? I think we have all base forces covered - electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and gravity, but that does not mean there are not other ways to release vast amounts of energy (especially in forms of high speed particles and radiation - both ionizing and non-ionizing) - any ideas?

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Nanheyangrouchuan RE:Other Weapons of Mass Destruction 2/9/2005 11:26:30 AM

"Heh, Nahey, but why would it explode at critical density? Of course, it would not need to - the suction would be destructive enough" That's the beauty of it. The gravity point would continue to suck matter in until the matter around the gravity point became so dense that nothing more could be packed in, at that point, a rebounding shock wave eminates from the matter and explodes outward. In a supernova, elements are pulled into the core and fused into new elements, until you reach iron. Supposedly, crystallized iron can't be fused, so the inward pull of gravity creates an outward shockwave that blows the layers of the sun off in a big explosion.

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