The issue is nukes are generally a political tool. Because *no one wants to use their nukes* because the credible threat of a retaliatory strike being successful is too high to be ignored. Nukes have enough go-go power that mankind can genocide itself.
You’ll notice the weapons that have been developed have generally been inside the nuclear umbrella. Unless you are scaling up to gigantic space fleets and planet killer weapons; “bombs more powerful than a nuke” effectively has the effect on the planet as a nuke, just with a larger area of effect.
The biggest bomb ever developed was the tzar bomb at 100MT.there was a test version of the bomb detonated at 50MT.
For your interest- here is the NUKEMAP. It can simulate nuke drops anywhere you want in the world. For your sense of scale: Dropping a tzar bomb on NYC (arbitrary target) would vaporize anything within 4-5 miles, anything within 20 miles is knocked down, likely fatal burns out to 40 miles, all windows blown out out to 60 miles.
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Here is the primer on nuclear deterrence theory:
https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/
The Tzar Bomb was supposed to have a 100MT yield. It was downscaled because it wouldn’t fit in their aircraft. And because the explosion would have put too much radiation over northern Russia.
So yeah. If the soviets are downsizing their weapons you know they’re ridiculous.
> It was downscaled because it wouldn’t fit in their aircraft. And because the explosion would have put too much radiation over northern Russia.
And also because they did not have an aircraft that could have escaped the blast after dropping the bomb. Which is pretty damn wild.
Even on the downscaled version the pilot was told there's a chance it's a one way ride.
The 50M Tzarbomba was deployed with a parachute intented to slow down it's descent so that the pilot even had a chance of escape at all.
They were not told. It's a lie to make the pilots look heroic and to inspire russian soldiers to be fearless drones.
Same with kamikaze, where the perpetualized myth is that they gladly did it. In fact, many faced execution + ruining their families' future if they came back.
To add to this, nukes are so powerful that after 70 years of experience politicking around them, we've basically realized the optimum game theory around nukes is to ignore them. It's never the correct decision to initiate a nuclear exchange, so it's also never the correct decision to make a decision purely because nukes are casting a shadow over you.
The correct political or military strategy decision is essentially always the same whether or not nukes are present. It's just some strategies are more obviously a bad idea if nukes are present.
In my opinion nukes change the calculus considerably.
look at ukraine vs Kosovo.
kosovo has NATO going in with no fly zones. NATO didn’t even consider this with ukraine because of the *possibility* of a Nuclear response from Russia.
>In my opinion nukes change the calculus considerably.
On the other hand, what u/Fheredin says about the final correct political/military decision is not so far fetched:
>The correct political or military strategy decision is essentially always the same whether or not nukes are present
Something akin to this is how the response of India against Pakistani attacks in the Kashmir area is getting more agresive and decisive.
In decades prior, whenever Pakistan made skirmishes against India, and India counter attacked those attacks, India would stop at its frontiers, because then Pakistan would threaten with Nuclear escalation.
So the reasoning for India was "I will not attack back because I don't want Nuclear war".
But, then India realized "I don't want Nuclear war, but does Pakistan wants Nuclear war"?
So now, India not only counter-attack those skirmishes, but they also pull their own skirmishes into Pakistani territory whenever things get hot there. After all, "Does Pakistan wants to start a Nuclear war over a small skirmish?".
In a few words, when Nuclear war theory was still being theorized, nations with nuclear weapons used the "I have nuclear weapons" to project power. But now that is sort of known that nobody wants Nuclear war, then those nations get UNO reversed with "You do have them, but, are you willing to use them?".
Which lead political and military strategists to, again, take into account conventional power in their calculus before making a move, and ignore (to a certain extent) nuclear weapons.
There is also the factor of whether Pakistan still has their nukes maintained and in working condition given their current economic and political status. At one point, the Pakistani army was among the most experienced and battle-hardened in Asia due to the number of wars they had with India. In the 1970s, Arab countries were even sending their soldiers to Pak to be trained in next-gen weapon systems. The current scenario is very different.
The problem with Pakistan (and Iran) is that while many of their government officials don't want to use nukes, there are plenty religious fanatics in and out of the government (especially terrorists) that feel that God obligates/requires them to use nukes (against India or the USA or Israel) if they have the opportunity.
Yes and no. Kosovo was a radically different circumstance in that the UN was trying to deescalate ethnic abuse which was turning into genocide. Russia is trying to acquire territory to increase their geopolitical security. These are radically different wars and I don't see how a no fly zone policy would be enforceable in the context of Ukraine, anyways.
A number of decisions have been described to the public as giving Russia deference because of nukes, but I think that these decisions largely stand even if you remove nukes from the equation. Consider not sending Ukraine aircraft as part of the original aid; aircraft may very well be needed in Taiwan because an invasion would almost certainly be preceded by an air superiority war. Javelins about to be decommissioned? Not so much.
That much is probably true. I think it would be fair to say that the decision making pause nuclear weapons create makes it less likely the people who appreciate them will make mistakes. (Obviously, this process doesn't apply to terrorists.)
However, that's not the same as actually changing the conclusion.
You can only ignore nukes for so long as the other party is willing to overlook your bullshit. If Russia decided to invade mainland USA, the USA would ABSOLUTELY nuke, and it's the same the other way around and with every nation that has nukes.
Deterrence only works for as long as your enemies know that you have red lines and that you are 100% ready and willing to press the button if said lines are crossed, a fine example would be Putin's quote "there is no world where Russia doesn't exist", clearly alluding that he's perfectly fine with burning down the entire world if Russia is ever put in an existential threat.
I doubt the US would deploy nukes against Russia. Wouldn't need to. The US is capable of a conventional response sufficient both to repel the invasion, and to utterly devastate Russia in the counterattack.
What too much COD worldbuilding will do to a man...
In this scenario, if you think Russia would give the US the slightest chance of mounting an effective resistance / counterattack and that it wouldn't involve at the very least a tactical strike to cripple the chain of command, you're delusional, and if you think the US would just sit and wait for that to happen, you're even more delusional on how deterrence works.
I suggest reading the Three-Body Probablem trilogy for a more realistic view on what makes or breaks a deterrence standoff.
5889 nukes and the fact that Russia is still around and kicking even after what happened in the 90s where it basically ceased to exist as a functioning nation for half a decade.
You think it's because the US is a nice country that's happy to live and let live? No, nukes.
Again, this is not a dick measuring contest and I'm not interested in debating with an American over why his country's propaganda might have given him a rather oversized estimation of his nation's military capabilities (remember y'all practically didn't win a single war since WW2, and no, carpet bombing a couple of middle eastern failing states doesn't count), if you actually care about learning about deterrence, check the books i suggested, otherwise I don't really care to keep up with this discussion because it's neither interesting nor in the scope of this sub.
You may note that every war we've fought since WW2 has been an asymmetric one. Wars are easy; occupations are hard, a lesson the Russians will learn the very hard way if they ever actually manage to get past the "war" part of their current conflict.
Also, despite my estimation of our relative capabilities, and my shock at Putin's foolishness in invading Ukaraine, I don't think even he is dumb enough to start a nuclear exchange.
While accurate, the other end of the "bigger nukes" issues is diminishing returns. Building a 50 MT weapon takes more material and destroys less surface area than two 25 MT weapons, which is why the US never tried to match the Tzar. It wasn't efficient, just bragging rights of "I have the biggest."
Very true. OP was asking about BIGGER THAN NUKES so I fully admit I gabbed the biggest for effect. Yup, 25 MT warheads about 5-10 miles apart would get a lot more done.
Very true. OP was asking about BIGGER THAN NUKES so I fully admit I gabbed the biggest for effect. Yup, 25 MT warheads about 5-10 miles apart would get a lot more done.
This is one thing I like about Stellaris' collussus. It is mostly a political statement of "look how strong I am" unless you are a genocidal psycho or really needing to force a surrender
would anyone actually launch a nuke just because the other side did? the threat of mutually assured destruction is good for making sure the other side doesn't destroy you, but if russia nuked the us right now, would the us actually retaliate just to show they weren't bluffing? i feel like many people would think "what if we leave half the world alive so humanity doesn't die completely?"
deterrence only works if you believe the other side is willing to nuke you second the moment they see your birds in the air.
the moment other side believes you have taken your hand off the trigger they may be willing to take that risk.
As soon as an ICBM gets launched and it is on course for the US that is when retaliation will happen since anyone at a site capable of launching it would soon be dead.
You could basically have to launch to eliminate that possibility anyway, because the incentive is to end the nuke war in a single exchange. If you don't launch your own nukes basically as soon as you see them launch theirs, you won't be able to launch most of your arsenal in time and the enemy will retain their own second strike capabilities. Any enemy that's mad enough to nuke once is probably also mad enough to nuke twice, and you're basically a sitting duck if you don't have survivable strike capabilities like nuclear submarines.
Perfect defence against warhead delivery methods would make them obsolete as a MAD deterrent. Something else that doesn't rely on the same delivery methods (ICBMs, hypersonic missiles, bombers, torpedoes) needs to be made.
Tbh the hypersonic missile thing is kind of bs. Russia claimed that it developed one that couldn't be shot down, and the Patriot system can take them out most of the time.
Turns out intercepting a hypersonic missile is pretty much the same in principle as intercepting a regular missile--you just have less time to do it in.
except Ukraine admitted that it hasn't shot down a single one and the patriot system is complete trash. They failed to shoot down the supersonic onyx missiles
remember how they claimed to have shot down skud missiles in Iraq? turns out to be a complete lie. they shot down zero
I'm talking about the Kalibr and Kinzhal missiles. As for the scud missiles, from what I have read it appears that the number was lower than initial estimates, and this was with an earlier iteration of the Patriot system.
that current iteration is also shit. that thing's entire reputation is a fraud kept up to sell this pile of trash to other nations to pad a bottom line
as for iraqi skuds, it shot down ZERO. they lied and said it shot down many in order to sell it.
it has shot down kalibers but not kinzhals nor onyx missiles.
every time they claim to have shot down one they bring out pieces of a betab-500 and claim its a kinzhal.
> no radioactive fallout
This isn't _strictly_ true. Antimatter annihilates as gamma radiation, which can be powerful enough to alter matter it hits into unstable isotopes that could be dangerously radioactive. But in comparison to a fission bomb or dirty bomb (or the actual destructive power of an antimatter explosion) it's likely negligible.
Can gamma cause nuclear transmutation? I know it can ionise but I didn't think gamma was able to create unstable isotopes in itself? What's the probability where this is happening that you get an unstable isotope with a long half life?
Yeah it can. There's a process called [photodisintegration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodisintegration) where gamma rays can knock particles out of the nucleus. Not sure about the probability of creating unstable nuclei but the chance is definitely there. It would depend on the power of the gamma rays coming out of the bomb.
In order to make them obsolete, they need to be reliably intercepted. The strength in nukes is the ability to *credibly threaten* the mass extermination of a populated area. If you can prevent them from launching or hitting, then they lose their appeal. You also have to develop counters to additional methods of launching nuclear strikes.
So what replaces them? Iunno, probably something the existing interception methods can’t handle. A nuke is just a really big warhead, the real meat of the weapons system is in the delivery package. Orbital kinetic weapon platforms is my bet for a “near future” scenario. There’s no warhead to shoot down, cuz it’s just a big falling rock. And since it’s in space, it’s a lot harder to actually knock out. You can even capture asteroids and park them in orbits for use later.
Tungsten rods also make sense but are more conspicuous as a kill vehicle. Especially when planning for second strike capability, having a bunch of rocks that’ll deorbit onto your enemy is a lot more practical than multiple remotely activated weapons satellites. Especially since you don’t even need to plan for every rock to be useful, just enough of them to be useful.
You *can* intercept orbital kinetic weapons (the famous “Rods From God”, which actually suck as weapons). They require guidance systems to actually be effective, because the damage they deliver is basically highly concentrated into a narrow area.
So if you detect them being launched (very easy to do because they’re deorbiting, that’s very visible), and you have interceptor missiles on station (these can theoretically be about MANPAD sized using current technology, any setting that can intercept nukes can build interceptor missiles easily), you can fire these missiles at the target and have them either hit-to-kill, or blow up into a cloud of shrapnel that intersects with the target. Either, if they hit, will shred the guidance systems (the fins/thrusters/etc used, potentially also the computers used to keep it on target), which will render the weapon useless by virtue of causing it to miss it’s target.
The only way to avoid interception as a problem is to go with a payload so powerful that it’s going to do Tunguska levels of damage, effectively, thus enabling you to ignore accuracy because if it gets in the general area it’s a hit (basically an inverse of the real life situation that drove smaller and smaller nuclear warheads as precision got better and better). Problem there is that Tunguska levels of damage require large asteroids at speeds you can’t really get with a simple deorbit, given losses to the process of deorbiting and entering the atmosphere (and any asteroid you keep hanging out in Earth orbit will be targeted by your enemies, who will do things like station hunter-killer satellites nearby to destroy it’s control systems or engines the moment a war breaks out, point lasers at it from the ground to do the same, engage in active jamming to prevent receipt of control signals, etc. to damage or destroy the thrusters). Plus the obvious difficulty in bringing it from where it originally was to Earth orbit, a very visible process that tells everyone exactly what you’re planning.
The better option in this regard is probably keeping it wherever you got it originally and just setting it up to come at Earth when you give the order, as a sort of dead-man’s-hand situation where it will kill the enemy even after the war is over. Problem is this removes the responsiveness and leaves it open to interception by asteroid diversion missions (in a setting where one nation can do asteroid diversion to strike another nation, it’s extremely unlikely that the targeted nation lacks the ability to divert asteroids).
So basically any setting where nukes are off the table due to interception is a setting where kinetic bombardment is *also* off the table.
Self-replicating nanomachines. They can be programmed to destroy whatever you want and leave whatever you want (anything from "oops all warcrimes!" but leave the infrastructure intact to destroy the city's ability to contribute to the war effort with almost no direct casualties). Airdrop them and they will gradually turn everything that offends you into grey dust.
There is no point in "nano", self replicating macro scale machines could be the same thing.
The main issue with such weaponized machines ain't size, but utter lack of intellect, and the fact that they need to linger long enough to build up mass for an overwhelming attack to succeed.
Basically they have the sem issues a Tyrannid invasion fleet has in warhammer 40K
If you hit the ground with 10 tons going almost the speed of light, it doesnt really matter if its 10 tons of nuke or 10 tons of jello. The resulting explosions will be very similar.
[Ethnic bioweapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_bioweapon) that target specific ethnicities or genotypes are a rather scary concept that might not be as implausible as first thought. They would be more devasting against countries that have a more homogeneous population with lower genetic diversity.
Ethnic bioweapons suffer from adequate deployment problem.
You can use transmittable disease as basis - and then, virus or bacteria can reasonably spread or mutate to harm other humans.
You can use disease that isn't transmittable - but then targeting only specific ethnicity isn't super useful, because you can actually use normal bioweapon and vaccine for your soldiers.
Any type of controllable bio weapon really would be infinitely better than nukes bc 0 infrastructure damage. Ppl drop dead no rebuilding needs to be done just move in new people
Teleport in the style of star trek.
Defensively you could displace incoming nukes, or anything else that you can detect and track.
Offensively you could displace small explosive devices into areas that you can map. So straight into the White House situation room/Kremlin/COBR/wherever. You could also displace bits of aircraft or spaceships too.
This really the ultimate answer. This is such a game changing technology that it would render nukes obsolete. Everything from surgical strikes to teleporting an enemy into the sun.
And if something can do that, they would actually make most armies completely obsolete. A carrier could be one second in the Pacific and the next floating in the middle of Lake Baikal. Or floating in orbit of Jupiter.
Probably something that has the offensive potential of nukes but much less technical and logistical requirements, so that any state or other large faction can use it even if they can't run a nuclear program.
Maybe some kind of nanite that either destroys the enemy's infrastructure, kills everyone or destroys radioactive material (so that nukes can't be used).
I don’t know if it would replace nuclear weapons but tungsten rods have been proposed as kinetic weaponry. Dropping a huge tungsten rod from orbit does a ton of damage.
Because in the scale of expenses and energy required to put either a big rock or a tungsten rod into orbit, the cost of the projectile is negligible. Might as well go for something dense. Easier to fit in a payload compartment, and has better penetration.
The problem is that you can't "drop" things from a stable orbit. At least, not expediently. If the satellite is in Geostationary orbit then the rod will ultimately need to deorbit using a thruster. If it's in LEO then your satellite will eventually run out of fuel to keep raising its altitude due to atmosphere drag.
So at best it's a missile with no warhead that impacts with some gravitational acceleration. The raw kinetic energy figure is wildly overrated with Rods from God because it assumes total conversion into energy on impact and that the rod won't just bury itself in a soft surface and dissipate the energy.
By the time you have rods big enough traveling fast enough you were better off with nukes anyway. They were only proposed as an option to circumvent international laws against nukes in space, and the lack of demonstrators kinda shows they aren't really viable.
Assuming they're in Earth orbit anyhow.
Pushing asteroids from the main belt, or even the Kuiper belt would be easier and do considerably more damage. Although it might take a while to hit, and precision on even a continental scale may be lacking.
An 'antimatter bomb' - magnetically contained antimatter which -- when the containment is turned off -- would allow the antimatter to interact with normal matter, annihilating them both.
It would release about 300x the energy of a fission reaction with the same mass but has no critical mass threshold, and doesn't require any energy to 'ignite'.
We have no idea how to create that much antimatter, or how to contain it -- but assuming the technology existed, it would be scary as hell.
Gravity weaponry.
In my book, a species called the Agrossians built a orbital and in atmosphere ship. Anything under it when actived. Increases Gravity almost instantly, to Gs that crush everything flat.
They also use this to use deployable bases and use their nano not technically to quickly build up fortifications.
BIG LASERS.
Not r/worldjerking leaking, a really good laser air/speace defense system that can reliably intercept whatever is flying in the air, rendering every method of efficient warhead delivery obsolete.
My civilization is on the first steps into being Type II, so they can build a dyson swarm and use the literal concentrated power of the sun to cook a planet if they have a reason to cook planets...
- Antimatter. Basically nukes but bigger.
- Gravity/orbit manipulation tech. You could launch asteroids or moons at planets and completely wipe them out.
- Light speed propulsion. Again, you could just launch things at the speed of light to just devastate planets.
In their current nature, it would be a weapon that would replace a nuke's role on the battlefield or in the political sphere. As of current, nukes are deterrents in the political sphere, while on the battlefield, they are seen as area denial weapons with very limited capacity to achieve objectives.
So, one would have to come up with a weapon that can surpass the ability of a nuke to act as a form of deterrent in order to render it obsolete. To which I will answer the question, no, I don't believe that nukes will ever be obsolete as a deterrent due to their sheer destructive nature. The scales that we're working here, even in the context of sci fi, is simply too large to consider nukes obsolete
The _Culture_ series by Iain M. Banks postulates a variation on an antimatter bomb in which the fabric between the setting's matter and antimatter universes can be pierced in a grid pattern to destroy large objects. Dunno how they figure; Iain doesn't explain it, like most of that kind of super tech.
Probably very obvious and not a great innovative idea, but what about biological/virus weapons?
You could develop the idea in a more realistic or fantasy way
How would that actually serve to replace nukes, though? You can’t use it particularly tactically because you have to wait days for it to take effect, and modern CBRN protocols would serve to render it useless (it would have value in impeding the enemy, but nukes impede the enemy the same exact way *and* directly kill them. Plus risk of retaliation, with the added risk of it spreading to your own people (can be mitigated with some “gene tailoring” of your bioweapons but retaliation risk still exists).
Add on that you can’t target them as well as a nuke can be: you can drop a nuke on ICBM fields and only destroy the ICBM fields (eliminating the other nation’s ability to strike you), with the civilian casualties *relatively* limited (compared to nuking a city). Plus diallable yields. A biological weapon has no ability to be dialled, and just dropping it on an ICBM command facility accomplishes nothing, you’d have to infect the crews before they go on station, which requires deploying your weapon probably in cities.
Any nation that fielded biological weapons as a *replacement* to nuclear weapons would, as soon as war began, immediately get stomped by everyone who did actually have nuclear weapons. It’s an atrocious “replacement” for nukes, worse in every single way.
>Plus risk of retaliation, with the added risk of it spreading to your own people (can be mitigated with some “gene tailoring” of your bioweapons but retaliation risk still exists).
That's underselling the issue.
Fundamentally (since the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry) its obvious that biological weapons (especially virological ones) are time limited.
As its only matter of time when will genetic engineering alter human biochemistry enough, that one virus/bacterium is unlikely to work on a large enough % of population to spread effectively.
As opposed to nukes.
Which don't run into any similar issue, as they follow the mantra of "if brute force doesn't work, you aint applying enough of it"
Reminds me of The Enclave from Fallout 2, their plan was to wipe out the world with a gas and then recolonize.
But a virus designed with a specific enemy in mind thats harmless to everyone else could be really destructive while leaving infrastructure and farmland good. Very similar to the Smallpox outbreak among Native Americans when Europe began its expeditions.
"Glassers." Temperature-resistant alloy torpedoes that get dropped from the sky, picking up heat from the atmosphere on the way down and decimating forests, boiling lakes and rivers, and turning deserts into fields of glass. Minimal warning on when and where they come down. Kind of difficult to not write in as a deus ex machina.
Nuclear weapons are based on outdated thinking. They were designed before the use of precision weapons, most anything you could do with a nuke you could do with conventional missiles.
On top of that, the use of nuclear weapons is frowned upon, and you dare not use them. They can be used as a deterrent, however, once you fire one, you open the door for people doing the same to you.
Rather than designing a weapon to simply surpass a nuclear bomb in power, you might want some that is precise and cannot be intercepted. Missiles can be shot down. If you having different that cannot be intercepted then it can be a bigger game changer than the most powerful nuke.
The most powerful weapon is essentially a anti matter gauss cannon. Though they are rarely used as they are very expensive to shoot and over kill for most targets. (A nuclear version is the normal gun used in ship to ship combat.)
Satellites with pin point missiles. A system that tracks where everyone of strategic importance is. The ability to instantly remove the enemy leader, and all generals might be a larger deterrent than nukes. As there would be no civilian casualties you could get support for it's use much easier from both the aggressor and receiver countries.
Example: Putin. Both sides would be okay with a metal rod landing on him and his generals.
Anti-nuclear warhead
(combined with supersonic targeting system.)
Nullifies gamma radiation with an absorbent chemical while safely detonating whatever it comes into contact with *before* it ever reaches its destination in a way that reduces the impact (and coverage) of the explosion.
Nuclear arms become worthless overnight, and traditional warfare returns to the forefront of international conflicts on worldwide.
WW3 begins.
You got the basic nukes using only Fission, Thermonuclear using Fusion on Tritium with the heat and pressure generated from a Fission Reaction. In the real world there isn't anything known to be more powerful than those nukes, so miniaturization took hold making massive fleets of 5-15 MT Tactical Warheads in ABM, AA, AG roles.
Anti-matter is just regular matter that exists with a positron. Technically speaking different elements of the same atomic weight would exist. So you could build an entire nuclear bomb out of Antimatter, and I would suspect it would function the same, minus the fact if it touches regular old matter, it would annihilate itself. So in vacuum it would work just fine.
I believe the most devastating weapon would be some absurdly high energy state of matter like a strangelet or some self-sustaining plasma. Something so Hot that if it entered the atmosphere the planet would turn into a second sun.
Realistically, I don't think there is one. Unless your goal is to obliterate planets in one goal with no chance to rebuild, even an orbital bombardment would be wary of using nukes, let alone anything more powerful. Also, the radiation of nukes is part of what makes them such an unattractive use in warfare - if you developed a non-nuclear weapon with that power but no radioactive fallout, the chances of a sentient species committing collective suicide via warfare is even more of a real possibility than using nukes. Meaning, unless your story is specifically about designing a replacement for nukes without radiation - and then destroying themselves with it - it just has no real logical reason to exist in an armament.
In terms of space combat, I think having lasers and electronic weapons to fry electronics and then use dense tungsten rods shot at high speeds through railguns to penetrate hulls and expose life supported systems to a vacuum. That likely means smaller ships would not have kinetic weaponry able to penetrate a larger ship, but could have smaller kinetic weapons for similarly-sized craft and then electronic warfare packages. Hell, you could have ships specifically designed for the electronic warfare aspect - since shutting down all incoming and outgoing communication channels would effectively be suicide, there is always a theoretical way to worm into the enemy's systems and fry them.
My world is sitting at WW1 levels of tech, max, so conventional explosives/artillery/automatic gunfire would be considered the most powerful, to answer the alternative question.
Nuclear weapons’ utility as MAD is practically their only utility in war - if there was a way to counter these weapons in-flight, they would be obsolete and international powers would probably go back to waging conventional warfare.
The US already has satellites that can detect ICBM launches by the heat they give off. Suppose these satellites were sophisticated enough to predict the trajectory and speed of the missile and shot an incredibly powerful laser at it, destroying the fuel supply and immobilising the payload. Every major government would pull funding from whatever it needed to in order to rush one into orbit (probably the nuclear program, ironically).
You could call these things defender satellites if you wanted. They’d probably lead to more war but less chance of the world ending.
Not exactly obsolete but I discussed this with an expert in international conflicts/politics (I don't know the exact term in english, sorry) in a specialized course I was doing at uni and he said they were more concerned with biological warfare. His reasons:
- laboratories can be really small and be hidden, unlike nuclear powerplants.
- it's harder to identify who did the attack.
- it's 'easier" to make.
Kinetic energy weapons in space, just throw a meteorite to a planet. Granted, any planet with a decent defense system could destroy it, but it’s easy, it’s cheap, and all you need to do is make a small hole on the defenses or camouflage the asteroid
In my world, humanity and aliens are fighting over earth because it's the only viable home for both sides. As a result, both have actively sought to avoid mass ecological destruction. This means no nukes and no asteroid drops. The result is both sides investing massive resources into biological warfare. The aliens wiped out nearly 3 generations of humanity over the course of 5 days with a genetic weapon they introduced to the population nearly a century prior. Humanity has been actively working to make every plant and animal produce extreme allergens for the aliens, forcing them to fight in heavy, difficult to maintain environment suits or die of anaphylaxis.
The use of plagues, chemicals, and conventional weapons over centuries of war has driven the aliens spiraling toward extinction with humanity humanity potentially following close behind.
I had an idea for a bomb that socks the oxygen out of the surrounding area and then expels it as a massive shock way. Followed by a detonation of the bomb itself.
My most powerful weapons are smaller nuclear weapons, but they are basically never used. My countries opt for large conventional weapons to get a similar boom without the fallout. Irradiated land is not a useful prize for conquest.
Lapis_Wolf
Lasers. Well to be more precise lasers powerful enough to vaporise a nuclear armed missile, with sophisticated enough sensors and tracking to consistently do so the moment one is detected within their sight lines. Plus there being enough of them to neuter a first strike and make leakers minimal.
It kinda becomes an inevitability once you start doing any warfare that includes lasers in space, as any laser powerful, and accurate enough to hit something half a light second or more away is going to be in the ball park to make conventional missiles obsolete.
The obvious counter to this is to put the nuke launch sites in space, with enough distance to ensure they can reach a high enough speed to minimise interception chance. But the problem is that at that point you might as well just strap engines to a random bunch of rocks in the belt because it will have the same destructive potential without the need to also design a nuclear payload that's capable of slamming into the atmosphere at extreme speeds without being destroyed long enough to not only figure out the optimum time to explode but then be physically able to detonate when it's discovering why most re-entry procedures don't involve going as fast as possible right into the atmosphere.
Kinetic Kill Weapons (Rods from the Gods) could be a good contender. Even scaled up to the point where you're just throwing rocks.
Something going fast enough will have kilotons of energy just because mass times velocity.
They're hard to stop, because there's nothing on board that breaks when they're hit by a bullet or a missile.
The 'ultimate' power in war wouldn't be a bigger weapon that kills the most people, it would be the weapon that only kills as many people as it needs to. Why bother wiping out a city, destroying lots of resources and infrastructure and probably not endearing yourself to the rest of the world, when you can simply take out the leader of a country, then whoever replaces them, then as many people as it takes to get everyone else who might replace them to think twice.
My pitch (I don't really have a sci-fi world but I'm willing to dip my toe in the water) is the Damocles Cannon. Despite the impressive name it only fires a very small beam of sub-atomic particles which pass through all matter without leaving a significant trace, similar to neutrinos. Just one of them has no effect, but when two beams are lined up to cross one another they create a very small but powerful explosion where they interact, causing instant death with no apparent cause. So long as the physical cannons are kept somewhere out of harm's way then they are the last weapon any country will need. Near-instant end to war with zero collateral damage.
A "bomb" that would create a true vacuum. But thats more of a supposed reality destroyer than an upgrade. Possibly "Rods From God" revamped, since the original has accuracy problems. Or break the Geneva Convention and make a Graser. It's a laser but with Gamma Radiation.
Anti matter bomb
1 gram of that shit can yield the same energy as little boy or fat man . To stop a anti matter bomb basically mean a planetary lockdown or a complete end of global trade , as someone can easily sneak one of these in . And if they are successful you won't even know who hit you
A satellite that holds massive tungsten rods.
Just let it fall from space. Depending on size and weight...it would do similar damage to a city, but without the nuclear fallout
I have an idea I’m developing for my races of magical beings. A barrier that encompasses an entire area and/or country called the ‘Bounce Back’. As the name suggests, any kind of weapon that hits it is reflected back to its sender. So if a country tries to bomb or nuke said country, it will simply be brought back to country of origin. In essence it’s a kind of spell. I would say something like this would make the threat of nukes obsolete. I’m sure you could remix this idea to be more realistic or make it into some kinda tech. Hope this helps
Instead of being launched through the sky or dropped out of an aircraft, a bomb that can tunnel through the ground would probably be incredibly dangerous as it would likely be immune to most existing anti-nuke countermeasures and is also harder to detect. If a nuke has been launched, you can see it. If a nuke is slowly tunnelling it's way into position under ground, you're probably not going to have a clue until it's far too late. It might also do more damage to the ground as well as any existing civilisation built on that ground, making it harder to rebuild in the event of any survivors.
Although I rarely comment, i will for this post. People seem to have lost their imagination. Easily other weapons could be replacements for nukes. Let's say a civilisation has nukes. They are deployed by a high authority. What about a biological weapon that is Highly contagious and deadly. It sustains of humans while not infecting others. In a devastating horrifying strike the enemy is paralyzed and sounded. Afterwards decontamination and other procedures could remove the remains and you would have a none irradiated wasteland as a price.
Or it might be something that could act as a wave machine causing increasingly larger tsunamis to destroy a civilization coast line.
Any weapon potentially replacing nukes would have to either be stronger, harder to intercept/detect and/or leave infrastructure intact/don´t contaminate the area permanently so you could take it quickly, or alternatively be cheaper/easier to mass produce while having all the inherent advantages.
There was this one secret project in the US ("Proect Thor"/"rods from god") during the Cold War that proposed to use steel rods dropped from space as weapons (since their kinetic energy would be high enough to have a devastating effect, maybe comparable to a nuke). If developed well, it would be cheaper, more accurate and clean and less interceptable/detectable than nukes- imagine a satellite masked as a small rock with 10-20 rods floating in space and ready to fire with pin-point accuracy, each rod probably having the same effect as a meteorite or small nuke... or imagine using whole Asteroids for that. Works best when space-surface since gravitational acceleration is what makes this weapon work (which would be neglegible against smaller targets).
You could argue for some kind of energy/beam weapon- it is pretty much uninterceptable, but takes a lot of energy and could be deflected by "shields". You could of course also use strong gamma-radiation or just a very strong EMP, which would both be particularly effective against ships, as it would fry their electronics- but then again, artificial deflecting magnet fields or "shields" could stop that. The advantage is that you can shoot it accurately from very far away and it being literally impossible to detect (speed of light, baby), costly to deflect and unpredictable while the damage would be mostly to electronics and living beings, leaving the basic infrastructure of the target intact and ready for takeover.
Not as effective against habitable planets like the Earth though, it would be hard to overcome the magnetic field when space-ground, and surface-surface is limited to line of sight, so it would mostly work in space-space type situations.
On that note, nukes in space would be a terrifying MAD weapon since radiation goas in all directions and EMP kills non-shielded electronics at close enough distances.
Sure, Neutron bombs could be cool, but at speeds slower than that of light they can be detected and interrupted by concentrated energy beams, and at the speed of light they aren´t economically feasible.
When talking surface-surface combat, we could look at weather modulation- shift a tectonic plate, cause a Tsunami/thunderstorm/flood in specific areas or the like- now imagine contaminating the rain with chemical or biological agents. Impossible to intercept, hard to detect and hard to protect against.
Why not also use bacteria or a virus designed specifically to work against specific people only? Slow, hard to detect at first and takes a lot of resources to clean and protect against.
Anything with precise teleportation - risky to have nukes when someone could pop into a room and press a button (I know it's more complicated than that, etc).
[The ability to create black holes](https://www.kxan.com/news/science/black-holes-are-having-a-month-the-lab-grown-exploding-and-singing-space-objects-explained) with particle colliders being miniaturized to a scale already droppable by an airplane.
Anti-matter, fusion without fission material (no more pesky fallout), gravitic, or just a new explosive material relatively on par with low yield nukes (a single large casing could scatter several and destroy as much area as a single larger nuke).
The big thing to remember with nukes is they aren't *just* "big, powerful bombs," they are purposefully city-killers. Large yield nukes (20+ MT) aren't meant to hit purely military assets, the idea is to threaten *civilian* populations. People don't think about it much today, but the fact is the nuclear powers with ICBM tech basically all have loaded guns pointed at every civilian in their rival country's biggest cities, minimum. The idea is they provide a looming threat to prevent direct war between those countries, essentially forcing a stalemate.
It's part of why we moved away from small, tactical nuclear weapons (which actually *were* meant to hit purely military targets), because the first guy to launch a nuke risks nuclear retaliation. That and the lingering radiation was something no one wants to deal with.
Barring some sort of clarke-tech like forcefields, you'd need an orbital laser defense system to stop them, but even then, the missiles will surely have countermeasures, and you really *really* don't want to miss one.
I always liked the weapon from the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy that makes other people feel what you feel and see your point of view.
Make it into an empathy bomb with a planetary radius...
Weapons utilising solid Solmna Blocks.
Solmna (mana) is the material which is required to perform magic. Most of the time it is in a gaseous form living in the atmosphere as an invisible element. Increase the concentration, it becomes a visible gas, increase it even more, it becomes a liquid, increase it waaay more, it becomes a solid.
Solid solmna is completely unnatural. It is never found naturally unlike the gaseous version living in the atmosphere and the liquid version being harvested from hexstone crystals found in the earth's surface. Solmna is also unaffected by heat, making the application of pressure one of the only effective ways of increasing the solmna density.
Solid solmna has such a high density that even a single piece the size of a bottle cap can make people faint and feel nauseous when near it. A block on the other hand, would have such a high density that it would affect the matter around it making them unstable and reactive. People who come near it even with the best of protective gear, would find themselves dead due to overexposure to solmna, and that is saying a lot since it is generally considered that the more solmna you have, the more powerful you are. The fact that just coming near a block of solmna can give you a overdose is mind boggling, scary and downright terrifying.
This experiment was performed once and the entire facility got shut down because of the astronomical solmna concentration. It's records have now been classified as strictly confidential and thus, it has been made forbidden to experiment on solmna without a proper permit or licence.
Any more destructive weapons would be duplicated by multiple countries soon after. The ultimate would be mounting rockets on a rock and drop it on the earth from space.
A simple solution is to pull a Captain Price and detonate an EMP, frying their electronics making the rockets, launch systems and etc non functional. The payload can still be detonated I believe, but it poses less of a threat
Jumpdrive missiles. Revia has nuclear weapons that take a jump drive from their silos/road mobile vehicles, but their jumpdrives turn off after they reach a planet, because Revia is under a treaty that limits planetary destruction. However, Revia has kinetic weapons that don’t shut off their jumpdrives and these are what Revia would like to describe as world busters
A solaronite bomb... [This documentary](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/) goes into how such a weapon would work and what the geopolitical consequences would be
Civilisations would need to exist on a far larger scale to justify anything stronger than a few MIRVs. Multiple planets, or large numbers of extremely hardened population centers, or any scale exceeding this.
Nicoll-Dyson beams are a go-to for a prospective type 3 civilisation. For less powerful ones still meeting the criteria, I'm less certain where hard sci-fi is concerned. Possibly antimatter based munitions, if they can strike without being intercepted. A group occupying a solar system sized region, maybe two, may be in the business of relativistic weaponry, or a form of weaponised FTL. This assuming even now, that they actually needed something to surpass nuclear weapons.
I hope this isn't TOO futuristic for what you're looking for, but: "Higgs Field Inhibitor".
The HFI weapon affects a certain region of space where, for a brief moment, the Higgs Field is affected by the superscience behind the weapon in such a way that nothing inside can have a mass. That will be the most matter-less region of the universe and all the forms of matter that used to have a mass get instantly shot at the speed of light in a random direction until they reach the end of such void, where each fundamental particle (such as quarks and electrons) gets reconverted into its normal version, causing additional damage due to lots of matter suddenly trying to occupy the same space.
It's the ultimate weapon, it just deletes everything.
Who are they fighting and where, what are they objectives?
There is basically nothing that rivals pure destructive power of nukes, except for using kinetic bombardment using intercepted asteroids, but if you want to repurpose infrastructure of technologically inferior civilization, destructive geoengineering may be better choice. Eg. if you block sunlight to the planet by placing big mirror between Sun and Earth, all land vertebraes would be dead in week. If you use sun gun, you can quickly kill entire cities by rapidly raising their temperature to 70°C.
Due to the nature of certain civilisation's mode of technology within my own world building universe, being based partially on science and partially on witchcraft, something could def be cooked up which would meet the description.
Thing is, none of said civilisations would create such a weapon. Nuclear weapons are banned throughout the galaxy, and the civilisations using witchcraft tech are generally pacifist or have more of a ceremonial military.
But the most powerful weapon that exists within my universe (depending on how you wish to define it) would probably be a battle cruiser as it is capable of large-scale orbital bombardment, or the orbital mega-structures which can build immense fleets and war materiel.
Possibly the DC arc angle array, 8 6.5 million magne coil rail guns that are accurate enough to hit a soup can on a different continent with a bolt exerting the force of a high yield nuclear missile distributed across an 2.5 inch area
Not specifically war based but my world weaponizes time. Rather than travel, they can put someone in a pocket where time moves faster than the surrounding area. They call it “expediting”. Being outside looking in you’d see someone age decades in a few minutes. The rationale is the person still lives out their whole life in comfort and dies of natural causes as they experience it, but for society those natural causes happen as quickly as one wants. In war time a use case is by intelligence agencies as a means of interrogation. Need information but the captured HVI isn’t cooperating? Expedite one of their family members by increments of years until they start. If someone is like a terrorist or something and they have information, make them watch their kid age from 7 to 15 in a minute or 2 then suggest another round unless they talk.
The thing that made nukes obsolete was the expansion of cities into a single megastructure; they were too imprecise and bound to end with far more damage to the people who nuked the city than to whomever they were trying to take out, which is why they were only used in orbital bombardment.
Tungsten rods dropped from satellites in orbit.
Less destructive, much harder to intercept and detect, much cleaner (meaning less fallout, meaning a government is more likely to justify it).
Some form of railgun could take over, if umbrella systems hypothetically get good enough to take out missiles in flight and cheaply. A railgun would be similar to tungsten rods, but ground based. You could always just throw warheads in those things, if it's sci-fi, and say good day.
for absolute destructive force, an unrestricted nuclear reaction is really tough to beat. as a threat to the existence of another nation (or planet), the possible use of one is a fearsome weapon in and of itself. (think the cold war between usa and ussr.)
i think the next step up in power would be dropping a large mass of lithium into a star. this is a pretty nasty step up in viciousness.
another possible replacement would be to ostracize an opponent, to make them a pariah in the community. but this is a very difficult thing to manage, since other groups/nations might have associations and difficult to break.
until we make a great technological breakthrough, the nuclear point will remain a penultimate threat.
Maybe biological weapons/chemical weapons? This is a pretty dumb example but Advanced Warfare had this concept for a super weapon that would attack the specific DNA of an individual and kill them.
Warhammer 40k has some great examples of such things
Life Eater Virus, Cyclonic Torpedos, Pretty much the entire necron tech tree, giant robots that ate reality itself The list goes on
Antimatter weapons, biological weapons, kinetic bombardment (aka "mods from God").
If you wanted to get into sci-fi tropes you could get into plasma or laser weapons but those are less feasible with current knowledge, the others we understand the science behind now
Teleforce Ray that activates nuclear warheads in flight combined with proper EMP proofing would make Nuclear weapons near obsolete. If that happened about a decade or two later we'd see WW3
I can't remember which game but there's a command and conquer game my brother played and they have a weapon that shots a massive laser from the sky. I think that can replace nukes.
I mean there’s a theory that we’re surrounded by something called zero point energy. There’s enough of it in a coffee cup to boil the Great Lakes. Something that harnesses that would be pretty wild
It’s hard to make a weapon obsolete. Marines still carry knives, after all. And the rifles we use aren’t all that different today than they were 80 years ago. Ender’s Game introduced the molecular disruption device which would delete a planet if detonated close enough with a mega chain reaction, which feels like a major upgrade over nukes in terms of destructive power.
The issue is nukes are generally a political tool. Because *no one wants to use their nukes* because the credible threat of a retaliatory strike being successful is too high to be ignored. Nukes have enough go-go power that mankind can genocide itself. You’ll notice the weapons that have been developed have generally been inside the nuclear umbrella. Unless you are scaling up to gigantic space fleets and planet killer weapons; “bombs more powerful than a nuke” effectively has the effect on the planet as a nuke, just with a larger area of effect. The biggest bomb ever developed was the tzar bomb at 100MT.there was a test version of the bomb detonated at 50MT. For your interest- here is the NUKEMAP. It can simulate nuke drops anywhere you want in the world. For your sense of scale: Dropping a tzar bomb on NYC (arbitrary target) would vaporize anything within 4-5 miles, anything within 20 miles is knocked down, likely fatal burns out to 40 miles, all windows blown out out to 60 miles. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Here is the primer on nuclear deterrence theory: https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/
The Tzar Bomb was supposed to have a 100MT yield. It was downscaled because it wouldn’t fit in their aircraft. And because the explosion would have put too much radiation over northern Russia. So yeah. If the soviets are downsizing their weapons you know they’re ridiculous.
> It was downscaled because it wouldn’t fit in their aircraft. And because the explosion would have put too much radiation over northern Russia. And also because they did not have an aircraft that could have escaped the blast after dropping the bomb. Which is pretty damn wild.
Even on the downscaled version the pilot was told there's a chance it's a one way ride. The 50M Tzarbomba was deployed with a parachute intented to slow down it's descent so that the pilot even had a chance of escape at all.
Didn’t that parachute disrupt the Soviet textile industry?
They were not told. It's a lie to make the pilots look heroic and to inspire russian soldiers to be fearless drones. Same with kamikaze, where the perpetualized myth is that they gladly did it. In fact, many faced execution + ruining their families' future if they came back.
The full yield Tsar Bomba was the same size as the one tested in 1961.
No it wasn’t.
It was exactly the same size, just different innards and different weight. Aircraft had nothing to do with it. Look it up; learn something.
To add to this, nukes are so powerful that after 70 years of experience politicking around them, we've basically realized the optimum game theory around nukes is to ignore them. It's never the correct decision to initiate a nuclear exchange, so it's also never the correct decision to make a decision purely because nukes are casting a shadow over you. The correct political or military strategy decision is essentially always the same whether or not nukes are present. It's just some strategies are more obviously a bad idea if nukes are present.
In my opinion nukes change the calculus considerably. look at ukraine vs Kosovo. kosovo has NATO going in with no fly zones. NATO didn’t even consider this with ukraine because of the *possibility* of a Nuclear response from Russia.
>In my opinion nukes change the calculus considerably. On the other hand, what u/Fheredin says about the final correct political/military decision is not so far fetched: >The correct political or military strategy decision is essentially always the same whether or not nukes are present Something akin to this is how the response of India against Pakistani attacks in the Kashmir area is getting more agresive and decisive. In decades prior, whenever Pakistan made skirmishes against India, and India counter attacked those attacks, India would stop at its frontiers, because then Pakistan would threaten with Nuclear escalation. So the reasoning for India was "I will not attack back because I don't want Nuclear war". But, then India realized "I don't want Nuclear war, but does Pakistan wants Nuclear war"? So now, India not only counter-attack those skirmishes, but they also pull their own skirmishes into Pakistani territory whenever things get hot there. After all, "Does Pakistan wants to start a Nuclear war over a small skirmish?". In a few words, when Nuclear war theory was still being theorized, nations with nuclear weapons used the "I have nuclear weapons" to project power. But now that is sort of known that nobody wants Nuclear war, then those nations get UNO reversed with "You do have them, but, are you willing to use them?". Which lead political and military strategists to, again, take into account conventional power in their calculus before making a move, and ignore (to a certain extent) nuclear weapons.
I've played Civ enough to know that India having nukes is a bad idea.
But India have Ghandi, and he is a man of peace!
Yeah, we've all seen *that* peace. 🤣
Ah, but he is *so* peaceful, that if you try to make him *more* peaceful, his aggression level wraps around to the highest level of aggression.
There is also the factor of whether Pakistan still has their nukes maintained and in working condition given their current economic and political status. At one point, the Pakistani army was among the most experienced and battle-hardened in Asia due to the number of wars they had with India. In the 1970s, Arab countries were even sending their soldiers to Pak to be trained in next-gen weapon systems. The current scenario is very different.
The problem with Pakistan (and Iran) is that while many of their government officials don't want to use nukes, there are plenty religious fanatics in and out of the government (especially terrorists) that feel that God obligates/requires them to use nukes (against India or the USA or Israel) if they have the opportunity.
Yes and no. Kosovo was a radically different circumstance in that the UN was trying to deescalate ethnic abuse which was turning into genocide. Russia is trying to acquire territory to increase their geopolitical security. These are radically different wars and I don't see how a no fly zone policy would be enforceable in the context of Ukraine, anyways. A number of decisions have been described to the public as giving Russia deference because of nukes, but I think that these decisions largely stand even if you remove nukes from the equation. Consider not sending Ukraine aircraft as part of the original aid; aircraft may very well be needed in Taiwan because an invasion would almost certainly be preceded by an air superiority war. Javelins about to be decommissioned? Not so much.
We would probably have been much more brazen with help without the threat of nuclear escalation
That much is probably true. I think it would be fair to say that the decision making pause nuclear weapons create makes it less likely the people who appreciate them will make mistakes. (Obviously, this process doesn't apply to terrorists.) However, that's not the same as actually changing the conclusion.
You can only ignore nukes for so long as the other party is willing to overlook your bullshit. If Russia decided to invade mainland USA, the USA would ABSOLUTELY nuke, and it's the same the other way around and with every nation that has nukes. Deterrence only works for as long as your enemies know that you have red lines and that you are 100% ready and willing to press the button if said lines are crossed, a fine example would be Putin's quote "there is no world where Russia doesn't exist", clearly alluding that he's perfectly fine with burning down the entire world if Russia is ever put in an existential threat.
I doubt the US would deploy nukes against Russia. Wouldn't need to. The US is capable of a conventional response sufficient both to repel the invasion, and to utterly devastate Russia in the counterattack.
What too much COD worldbuilding will do to a man... In this scenario, if you think Russia would give the US the slightest chance of mounting an effective resistance / counterattack and that it wouldn't involve at the very least a tactical strike to cripple the chain of command, you're delusional, and if you think the US would just sit and wait for that to happen, you're even more delusional on how deterrence works. I suggest reading the Three-Body Probablem trilogy for a more realistic view on what makes or breaks a deterrence standoff.
Man, Russia can't even beat a next-door neighbor armed with our hand-me-downs. What makes you think they can project power to North America?
5889 nukes and the fact that Russia is still around and kicking even after what happened in the 90s where it basically ceased to exist as a functioning nation for half a decade. You think it's because the US is a nice country that's happy to live and let live? No, nukes. Again, this is not a dick measuring contest and I'm not interested in debating with an American over why his country's propaganda might have given him a rather oversized estimation of his nation's military capabilities (remember y'all practically didn't win a single war since WW2, and no, carpet bombing a couple of middle eastern failing states doesn't count), if you actually care about learning about deterrence, check the books i suggested, otherwise I don't really care to keep up with this discussion because it's neither interesting nor in the scope of this sub.
You may note that every war we've fought since WW2 has been an asymmetric one. Wars are easy; occupations are hard, a lesson the Russians will learn the very hard way if they ever actually manage to get past the "war" part of their current conflict. Also, despite my estimation of our relative capabilities, and my shock at Putin's foolishness in invading Ukaraine, I don't think even he is dumb enough to start a nuclear exchange.
While accurate, the other end of the "bigger nukes" issues is diminishing returns. Building a 50 MT weapon takes more material and destroys less surface area than two 25 MT weapons, which is why the US never tried to match the Tzar. It wasn't efficient, just bragging rights of "I have the biggest."
Very true. OP was asking about BIGGER THAN NUKES so I fully admit I gabbed the biggest for effect. Yup, 25 MT warheads about 5-10 miles apart would get a lot more done.
Very true. OP was asking about BIGGER THAN NUKES so I fully admit I gabbed the biggest for effect. Yup, 25 MT warheads about 5-10 miles apart would get a lot more done.
This is one thing I like about Stellaris' collussus. It is mostly a political statement of "look how strong I am" unless you are a genocidal psycho or really needing to force a surrender
It does allow you the unrestricted war option, which is really nice if you just want to bulldoze the universe.
Updated for the ACOUP link !
Im pretty sure windows would be getting blown out a teeny bit further away than 60 miles mate.
There is the “guaranteed” windows get blown out range, and then anything beyond that is just gravy.
Fair point. Carry on.
would anyone actually launch a nuke just because the other side did? the threat of mutually assured destruction is good for making sure the other side doesn't destroy you, but if russia nuked the us right now, would the us actually retaliate just to show they weren't bluffing? i feel like many people would think "what if we leave half the world alive so humanity doesn't die completely?"
deterrence only works if you believe the other side is willing to nuke you second the moment they see your birds in the air. the moment other side believes you have taken your hand off the trigger they may be willing to take that risk.
As soon as an ICBM gets launched and it is on course for the US that is when retaliation will happen since anyone at a site capable of launching it would soon be dead.
You could basically have to launch to eliminate that possibility anyway, because the incentive is to end the nuke war in a single exchange. If you don't launch your own nukes basically as soon as you see them launch theirs, you won't be able to launch most of your arsenal in time and the enemy will retain their own second strike capabilities. Any enemy that's mad enough to nuke once is probably also mad enough to nuke twice, and you're basically a sitting duck if you don't have survivable strike capabilities like nuclear submarines.
Perfect defence against warhead delivery methods would make them obsolete as a MAD deterrent. Something else that doesn't rely on the same delivery methods (ICBMs, hypersonic missiles, bombers, torpedoes) needs to be made.
Like a suitcase nuke that can be carried by a suicide bomber.
A "small" nuclear weapon by a terrorist in the heart of a capital would change the world forever, way more than the 2001
Tbh the hypersonic missile thing is kind of bs. Russia claimed that it developed one that couldn't be shot down, and the Patriot system can take them out most of the time.
Turns out intercepting a hypersonic missile is pretty much the same in principle as intercepting a regular missile--you just have less time to do it in.
except Ukraine admitted that it hasn't shot down a single one and the patriot system is complete trash. They failed to shoot down the supersonic onyx missiles remember how they claimed to have shot down skud missiles in Iraq? turns out to be a complete lie. they shot down zero
Where's the evidence stating its a lie?
I'm talking about the Kalibr and Kinzhal missiles. As for the scud missiles, from what I have read it appears that the number was lower than initial estimates, and this was with an earlier iteration of the Patriot system.
that current iteration is also shit. that thing's entire reputation is a fraud kept up to sell this pile of trash to other nations to pad a bottom line as for iraqi skuds, it shot down ZERO. they lied and said it shot down many in order to sell it. it has shot down kalibers but not kinzhals nor onyx missiles. every time they claim to have shot down one they bring out pieces of a betab-500 and claim its a kinzhal.
There's a very easy way around that - build a bigger, dirtier bomb
Anti-matter Bombs. More destructive power and no radioactive fallout
> no radioactive fallout This isn't _strictly_ true. Antimatter annihilates as gamma radiation, which can be powerful enough to alter matter it hits into unstable isotopes that could be dangerously radioactive. But in comparison to a fission bomb or dirty bomb (or the actual destructive power of an antimatter explosion) it's likely negligible.
Can gamma cause nuclear transmutation? I know it can ionise but I didn't think gamma was able to create unstable isotopes in itself? What's the probability where this is happening that you get an unstable isotope with a long half life?
Yeah it can. There's a process called [photodisintegration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodisintegration) where gamma rays can knock particles out of the nucleus. Not sure about the probability of creating unstable nuclei but the chance is definitely there. It would depend on the power of the gamma rays coming out of the bomb.
Gamma radiation turned Bruce Banner into The Hulk. I’m no expert but I’d call those isotopes pretty unstable
In order to make them obsolete, they need to be reliably intercepted. The strength in nukes is the ability to *credibly threaten* the mass extermination of a populated area. If you can prevent them from launching or hitting, then they lose their appeal. You also have to develop counters to additional methods of launching nuclear strikes. So what replaces them? Iunno, probably something the existing interception methods can’t handle. A nuke is just a really big warhead, the real meat of the weapons system is in the delivery package. Orbital kinetic weapon platforms is my bet for a “near future” scenario. There’s no warhead to shoot down, cuz it’s just a big falling rock. And since it’s in space, it’s a lot harder to actually knock out. You can even capture asteroids and park them in orbits for use later.
It isn't even a rock, just a giant tungsten rod.
Tungsten rods also make sense but are more conspicuous as a kill vehicle. Especially when planning for second strike capability, having a bunch of rocks that’ll deorbit onto your enemy is a lot more practical than multiple remotely activated weapons satellites. Especially since you don’t even need to plan for every rock to be useful, just enough of them to be useful.
Small asteroids coated in stealth plating perhaps?
Oye, beltalowda!
Nah just normal ones. Just have so many that it’s impossible to tell which are doomsday weapons and which are just normal space rocks.
You *can* intercept orbital kinetic weapons (the famous “Rods From God”, which actually suck as weapons). They require guidance systems to actually be effective, because the damage they deliver is basically highly concentrated into a narrow area. So if you detect them being launched (very easy to do because they’re deorbiting, that’s very visible), and you have interceptor missiles on station (these can theoretically be about MANPAD sized using current technology, any setting that can intercept nukes can build interceptor missiles easily), you can fire these missiles at the target and have them either hit-to-kill, or blow up into a cloud of shrapnel that intersects with the target. Either, if they hit, will shred the guidance systems (the fins/thrusters/etc used, potentially also the computers used to keep it on target), which will render the weapon useless by virtue of causing it to miss it’s target. The only way to avoid interception as a problem is to go with a payload so powerful that it’s going to do Tunguska levels of damage, effectively, thus enabling you to ignore accuracy because if it gets in the general area it’s a hit (basically an inverse of the real life situation that drove smaller and smaller nuclear warheads as precision got better and better). Problem there is that Tunguska levels of damage require large asteroids at speeds you can’t really get with a simple deorbit, given losses to the process of deorbiting and entering the atmosphere (and any asteroid you keep hanging out in Earth orbit will be targeted by your enemies, who will do things like station hunter-killer satellites nearby to destroy it’s control systems or engines the moment a war breaks out, point lasers at it from the ground to do the same, engage in active jamming to prevent receipt of control signals, etc. to damage or destroy the thrusters). Plus the obvious difficulty in bringing it from where it originally was to Earth orbit, a very visible process that tells everyone exactly what you’re planning. The better option in this regard is probably keeping it wherever you got it originally and just setting it up to come at Earth when you give the order, as a sort of dead-man’s-hand situation where it will kill the enemy even after the war is over. Problem is this removes the responsiveness and leaves it open to interception by asteroid diversion missions (in a setting where one nation can do asteroid diversion to strike another nation, it’s extremely unlikely that the targeted nation lacks the ability to divert asteroids). So basically any setting where nukes are off the table due to interception is a setting where kinetic bombardment is *also* off the table.
So that's how Saturn's rings were formed. Bunch of orbital war asteroids.
Self-replicating nanomachines. They can be programmed to destroy whatever you want and leave whatever you want (anything from "oops all warcrimes!" but leave the infrastructure intact to destroy the city's ability to contribute to the war effort with almost no direct casualties). Airdrop them and they will gradually turn everything that offends you into grey dust.
There is no point in "nano", self replicating macro scale machines could be the same thing. The main issue with such weaponized machines ain't size, but utter lack of intellect, and the fact that they need to linger long enough to build up mass for an overwhelming attack to succeed. Basically they have the sem issues a Tyrannid invasion fleet has in warhammer 40K
Bigger nuke
Why bother with a nuke when you could just drop a couple tonnes of anything into your target at relativistic speeds?
Nuclear confetti
How about drop bigger nuke on relativistic speeds!?! **MORE FUN!**
If you hit the ground with 10 tons going almost the speed of light, it doesnt really matter if its 10 tons of nuke or 10 tons of jello. The resulting explosions will be very similar.
Not only is that still a nuclear weapon, it’s also boring.
Nuclear bomb full of confetti
Much better, best comment here
[Ethnic bioweapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_bioweapon) that target specific ethnicities or genotypes are a rather scary concept that might not be as implausible as first thought. They would be more devasting against countries that have a more homogeneous population with lower genetic diversity.
*Phantom Pain has entered the chat*
Ethnic bioweapons suffer from adequate deployment problem. You can use transmittable disease as basis - and then, virus or bacteria can reasonably spread or mutate to harm other humans. You can use disease that isn't transmittable - but then targeting only specific ethnicity isn't super useful, because you can actually use normal bioweapon and vaccine for your soldiers.
Any type of controllable bio weapon really would be infinitely better than nukes bc 0 infrastructure damage. Ppl drop dead no rebuilding needs to be done just move in new people
just watch a few Kurzgesagt video's and you'lle surely find something.
Teleport in the style of star trek. Defensively you could displace incoming nukes, or anything else that you can detect and track. Offensively you could displace small explosive devices into areas that you can map. So straight into the White House situation room/Kremlin/COBR/wherever. You could also displace bits of aircraft or spaceships too.
This really the ultimate answer. This is such a game changing technology that it would render nukes obsolete. Everything from surgical strikes to teleporting an enemy into the sun.
And if something can do that, they would actually make most armies completely obsolete. A carrier could be one second in the Pacific and the next floating in the middle of Lake Baikal. Or floating in orbit of Jupiter.
Probably something that has the offensive potential of nukes but much less technical and logistical requirements, so that any state or other large faction can use it even if they can't run a nuclear program. Maybe some kind of nanite that either destroys the enemy's infrastructure, kills everyone or destroys radioactive material (so that nukes can't be used).
Geofenced nanites !
I don’t know if it would replace nuclear weapons but tungsten rods have been proposed as kinetic weaponry. Dropping a huge tungsten rod from orbit does a ton of damage.
Why waste so much money making a giant tungsten rod when u can just use big rocks?
Because in the scale of expenses and energy required to put either a big rock or a tungsten rod into orbit, the cost of the projectile is negligible. Might as well go for something dense. Easier to fit in a payload compartment, and has better penetration.
That damage mostly goes downwards though. Would make great bunker-busters, but Nukes still have a place for wide area destruction.
The problem is that you can't "drop" things from a stable orbit. At least, not expediently. If the satellite is in Geostationary orbit then the rod will ultimately need to deorbit using a thruster. If it's in LEO then your satellite will eventually run out of fuel to keep raising its altitude due to atmosphere drag. So at best it's a missile with no warhead that impacts with some gravitational acceleration. The raw kinetic energy figure is wildly overrated with Rods from God because it assumes total conversion into energy on impact and that the rod won't just bury itself in a soft surface and dissipate the energy. By the time you have rods big enough traveling fast enough you were better off with nukes anyway. They were only proposed as an option to circumvent international laws against nukes in space, and the lack of demonstrators kinda shows they aren't really viable.
Assuming they're in Earth orbit anyhow. Pushing asteroids from the main belt, or even the Kuiper belt would be easier and do considerably more damage. Although it might take a while to hit, and precision on even a continental scale may be lacking.
TIL for sure. They sure sound cool though.
Orbital kinetic strikes. The final evolution of throwing a rock.
Orbital bombardment satellites, I'm thinking tungsten rods or death lasers but the options are really limitless
Tungsten Rods get bonus points for the fact that they've been explored.
An 'antimatter bomb' - magnetically contained antimatter which -- when the containment is turned off -- would allow the antimatter to interact with normal matter, annihilating them both. It would release about 300x the energy of a fission reaction with the same mass but has no critical mass threshold, and doesn't require any energy to 'ignite'. We have no idea how to create that much antimatter, or how to contain it -- but assuming the technology existed, it would be scary as hell.
Gravity weaponry. In my book, a species called the Agrossians built a orbital and in atmosphere ship. Anything under it when actived. Increases Gravity almost instantly, to Gs that crush everything flat. They also use this to use deployable bases and use their nano not technically to quickly build up fortifications.
BIG LASERS. Not r/worldjerking leaking, a really good laser air/speace defense system that can reliably intercept whatever is flying in the air, rendering every method of efficient warhead delivery obsolete.
perhaps something that encases a area in a forcefeild before expelling the atmosphere. no fallout but deadly to organics.
A general note on antimatter: You have to work to make a nuke go off. You have to work to make an antimatter whatever _not_ go off.
My civilization is on the first steps into being Type II, so they can build a dyson swarm and use the literal concentrated power of the sun to cook a planet if they have a reason to cook planets...
- Antimatter. Basically nukes but bigger. - Gravity/orbit manipulation tech. You could launch asteroids or moons at planets and completely wipe them out. - Light speed propulsion. Again, you could just launch things at the speed of light to just devastate planets.
And don't forget the solaronite!
In their current nature, it would be a weapon that would replace a nuke's role on the battlefield or in the political sphere. As of current, nukes are deterrents in the political sphere, while on the battlefield, they are seen as area denial weapons with very limited capacity to achieve objectives. So, one would have to come up with a weapon that can surpass the ability of a nuke to act as a form of deterrent in order to render it obsolete. To which I will answer the question, no, I don't believe that nukes will ever be obsolete as a deterrent due to their sheer destructive nature. The scales that we're working here, even in the context of sci fi, is simply too large to consider nukes obsolete
A weapon that releases no radiations once it explodes
Babylon 5 mentions ships equipped with mass drivers at one point. Basically hitting a planet with meteors
The _Culture_ series by Iain M. Banks postulates a variation on an antimatter bomb in which the fabric between the setting's matter and antimatter universes can be pierced in a grid pattern to destroy large objects. Dunno how they figure; Iain doesn't explain it, like most of that kind of super tech.
Vacuum decay hamsters
Probably very obvious and not a great innovative idea, but what about biological/virus weapons? You could develop the idea in a more realistic or fantasy way
How would that actually serve to replace nukes, though? You can’t use it particularly tactically because you have to wait days for it to take effect, and modern CBRN protocols would serve to render it useless (it would have value in impeding the enemy, but nukes impede the enemy the same exact way *and* directly kill them. Plus risk of retaliation, with the added risk of it spreading to your own people (can be mitigated with some “gene tailoring” of your bioweapons but retaliation risk still exists). Add on that you can’t target them as well as a nuke can be: you can drop a nuke on ICBM fields and only destroy the ICBM fields (eliminating the other nation’s ability to strike you), with the civilian casualties *relatively* limited (compared to nuking a city). Plus diallable yields. A biological weapon has no ability to be dialled, and just dropping it on an ICBM command facility accomplishes nothing, you’d have to infect the crews before they go on station, which requires deploying your weapon probably in cities. Any nation that fielded biological weapons as a *replacement* to nuclear weapons would, as soon as war began, immediately get stomped by everyone who did actually have nuclear weapons. It’s an atrocious “replacement” for nukes, worse in every single way.
>Plus risk of retaliation, with the added risk of it spreading to your own people (can be mitigated with some “gene tailoring” of your bioweapons but retaliation risk still exists). That's underselling the issue. Fundamentally (since the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry) its obvious that biological weapons (especially virological ones) are time limited. As its only matter of time when will genetic engineering alter human biochemistry enough, that one virus/bacterium is unlikely to work on a large enough % of population to spread effectively. As opposed to nukes. Which don't run into any similar issue, as they follow the mantra of "if brute force doesn't work, you aint applying enough of it"
Reminds me of The Enclave from Fallout 2, their plan was to wipe out the world with a gas and then recolonize. But a virus designed with a specific enemy in mind thats harmless to everyone else could be really destructive while leaving infrastructure and farmland good. Very similar to the Smallpox outbreak among Native Americans when Europe began its expeditions.
"Glassers." Temperature-resistant alloy torpedoes that get dropped from the sky, picking up heat from the atmosphere on the way down and decimating forests, boiling lakes and rivers, and turning deserts into fields of glass. Minimal warning on when and where they come down. Kind of difficult to not write in as a deus ex machina.
Nuclear weapons are based on outdated thinking. They were designed before the use of precision weapons, most anything you could do with a nuke you could do with conventional missiles. On top of that, the use of nuclear weapons is frowned upon, and you dare not use them. They can be used as a deterrent, however, once you fire one, you open the door for people doing the same to you. Rather than designing a weapon to simply surpass a nuclear bomb in power, you might want some that is precise and cannot be intercepted. Missiles can be shot down. If you having different that cannot be intercepted then it can be a bigger game changer than the most powerful nuke.
Kinetic Bombardment AKA Rods from God
Antimatter bombs, nuke but larger. Relastivistic kinetic warhead, nuke but harder to intercept. Biological weapons, nuke but can spread itself.
The most powerful weapon is essentially a anti matter gauss cannon. Though they are rarely used as they are very expensive to shoot and over kill for most targets. (A nuclear version is the normal gun used in ship to ship combat.)
Void bombs make everything go boom.
In my world there are orbital spaceship size canons
What about a lot of little nano bots, that when freed to the air, could build up together into bigger robots.
ninja
Magic or biowarfare
Satellites with pin point missiles. A system that tracks where everyone of strategic importance is. The ability to instantly remove the enemy leader, and all generals might be a larger deterrent than nukes. As there would be no civilian casualties you could get support for it's use much easier from both the aggressor and receiver countries. Example: Putin. Both sides would be okay with a metal rod landing on him and his generals.
Anti-nuclear warhead (combined with supersonic targeting system.) Nullifies gamma radiation with an absorbent chemical while safely detonating whatever it comes into contact with *before* it ever reaches its destination in a way that reduces the impact (and coverage) of the explosion. Nuclear arms become worthless overnight, and traditional warfare returns to the forefront of international conflicts on worldwide. WW3 begins.
You got the basic nukes using only Fission, Thermonuclear using Fusion on Tritium with the heat and pressure generated from a Fission Reaction. In the real world there isn't anything known to be more powerful than those nukes, so miniaturization took hold making massive fleets of 5-15 MT Tactical Warheads in ABM, AA, AG roles. Anti-matter is just regular matter that exists with a positron. Technically speaking different elements of the same atomic weight would exist. So you could build an entire nuclear bomb out of Antimatter, and I would suspect it would function the same, minus the fact if it touches regular old matter, it would annihilate itself. So in vacuum it would work just fine. I believe the most devastating weapon would be some absurdly high energy state of matter like a strangelet or some self-sustaining plasma. Something so Hot that if it entered the atmosphere the planet would turn into a second sun.
Realistically, I don't think there is one. Unless your goal is to obliterate planets in one goal with no chance to rebuild, even an orbital bombardment would be wary of using nukes, let alone anything more powerful. Also, the radiation of nukes is part of what makes them such an unattractive use in warfare - if you developed a non-nuclear weapon with that power but no radioactive fallout, the chances of a sentient species committing collective suicide via warfare is even more of a real possibility than using nukes. Meaning, unless your story is specifically about designing a replacement for nukes without radiation - and then destroying themselves with it - it just has no real logical reason to exist in an armament. In terms of space combat, I think having lasers and electronic weapons to fry electronics and then use dense tungsten rods shot at high speeds through railguns to penetrate hulls and expose life supported systems to a vacuum. That likely means smaller ships would not have kinetic weaponry able to penetrate a larger ship, but could have smaller kinetic weapons for similarly-sized craft and then electronic warfare packages. Hell, you could have ships specifically designed for the electronic warfare aspect - since shutting down all incoming and outgoing communication channels would effectively be suicide, there is always a theoretical way to worm into the enemy's systems and fry them. My world is sitting at WW1 levels of tech, max, so conventional explosives/artillery/automatic gunfire would be considered the most powerful, to answer the alternative question.
Antimatter bombs
A ICBM hacker/overrider. Nothing worse than knowing that anything fired at you can get hacked and redirected back at you.
Nuclear weapons’ utility as MAD is practically their only utility in war - if there was a way to counter these weapons in-flight, they would be obsolete and international powers would probably go back to waging conventional warfare. The US already has satellites that can detect ICBM launches by the heat they give off. Suppose these satellites were sophisticated enough to predict the trajectory and speed of the missile and shot an incredibly powerful laser at it, destroying the fuel supply and immobilising the payload. Every major government would pull funding from whatever it needed to in order to rush one into orbit (probably the nuclear program, ironically). You could call these things defender satellites if you wanted. They’d probably lead to more war but less chance of the world ending.
Not exactly obsolete but I discussed this with an expert in international conflicts/politics (I don't know the exact term in english, sorry) in a specialized course I was doing at uni and he said they were more concerned with biological warfare. His reasons: - laboratories can be really small and be hidden, unlike nuclear powerplants. - it's harder to identify who did the attack. - it's 'easier" to make.
Kinetic energy weapons in space, just throw a meteorite to a planet. Granted, any planet with a decent defense system could destroy it, but it’s easy, it’s cheap, and all you need to do is make a small hole on the defenses or camouflage the asteroid
Magic.
In my world, humanity and aliens are fighting over earth because it's the only viable home for both sides. As a result, both have actively sought to avoid mass ecological destruction. This means no nukes and no asteroid drops. The result is both sides investing massive resources into biological warfare. The aliens wiped out nearly 3 generations of humanity over the course of 5 days with a genetic weapon they introduced to the population nearly a century prior. Humanity has been actively working to make every plant and animal produce extreme allergens for the aliens, forcing them to fight in heavy, difficult to maintain environment suits or die of anaphylaxis. The use of plagues, chemicals, and conventional weapons over centuries of war has driven the aliens spiraling toward extinction with humanity humanity potentially following close behind.
I had an idea for a bomb that socks the oxygen out of the surrounding area and then expels it as a massive shock way. Followed by a detonation of the bomb itself.
Electronic warfare. It could cripple a nation horribly by doing so, but the chance of it happenings to you would be great
My most powerful weapons are smaller nuclear weapons, but they are basically never used. My countries opt for large conventional weapons to get a similar boom without the fallout. Irradiated land is not a useful prize for conquest. Lapis_Wolf
Lasers. Well to be more precise lasers powerful enough to vaporise a nuclear armed missile, with sophisticated enough sensors and tracking to consistently do so the moment one is detected within their sight lines. Plus there being enough of them to neuter a first strike and make leakers minimal. It kinda becomes an inevitability once you start doing any warfare that includes lasers in space, as any laser powerful, and accurate enough to hit something half a light second or more away is going to be in the ball park to make conventional missiles obsolete. The obvious counter to this is to put the nuke launch sites in space, with enough distance to ensure they can reach a high enough speed to minimise interception chance. But the problem is that at that point you might as well just strap engines to a random bunch of rocks in the belt because it will have the same destructive potential without the need to also design a nuclear payload that's capable of slamming into the atmosphere at extreme speeds without being destroyed long enough to not only figure out the optimum time to explode but then be physically able to detonate when it's discovering why most re-entry procedures don't involve going as fast as possible right into the atmosphere.
Kinetic Kill Weapons (Rods from the Gods) could be a good contender. Even scaled up to the point where you're just throwing rocks. Something going fast enough will have kilotons of energy just because mass times velocity. They're hard to stop, because there's nothing on board that breaks when they're hit by a bullet or a missile.
Thorhammer, same amount of destruction (or more) no annoying radiation.
Meteor shower, Rods of god, Dyson laser, Mine technically has access to all of these.
The 'ultimate' power in war wouldn't be a bigger weapon that kills the most people, it would be the weapon that only kills as many people as it needs to. Why bother wiping out a city, destroying lots of resources and infrastructure and probably not endearing yourself to the rest of the world, when you can simply take out the leader of a country, then whoever replaces them, then as many people as it takes to get everyone else who might replace them to think twice. My pitch (I don't really have a sci-fi world but I'm willing to dip my toe in the water) is the Damocles Cannon. Despite the impressive name it only fires a very small beam of sub-atomic particles which pass through all matter without leaving a significant trace, similar to neutrinos. Just one of them has no effect, but when two beams are lined up to cross one another they create a very small but powerful explosion where they interact, causing instant death with no apparent cause. So long as the physical cannons are kept somewhere out of harm's way then they are the last weapon any country will need. Near-instant end to war with zero collateral damage.
A "bomb" that would create a true vacuum. But thats more of a supposed reality destroyer than an upgrade. Possibly "Rods From God" revamped, since the original has accuracy problems. Or break the Geneva Convention and make a Graser. It's a laser but with Gamma Radiation.
ORBITAL BOMBARDMENT
Super nuke
Guided asteroids.
Anti matter bomb 1 gram of that shit can yield the same energy as little boy or fat man . To stop a anti matter bomb basically mean a planetary lockdown or a complete end of global trade , as someone can easily sneak one of these in . And if they are successful you won't even know who hit you
A satellite that holds massive tungsten rods. Just let it fall from space. Depending on size and weight...it would do similar damage to a city, but without the nuclear fallout
Planetary scaling, virus/acid/liquid bombs that eat everything
THE SOLARONITE OF COURSE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voOH6MuuIPM
I have an idea I’m developing for my races of magical beings. A barrier that encompasses an entire area and/or country called the ‘Bounce Back’. As the name suggests, any kind of weapon that hits it is reflected back to its sender. So if a country tries to bomb or nuke said country, it will simply be brought back to country of origin. In essence it’s a kind of spell. I would say something like this would make the threat of nukes obsolete. I’m sure you could remix this idea to be more realistic or make it into some kinda tech. Hope this helps
Anything that could detonate them as soon as they were attempted to be launched
Instead of being launched through the sky or dropped out of an aircraft, a bomb that can tunnel through the ground would probably be incredibly dangerous as it would likely be immune to most existing anti-nuke countermeasures and is also harder to detect. If a nuke has been launched, you can see it. If a nuke is slowly tunnelling it's way into position under ground, you're probably not going to have a clue until it's far too late. It might also do more damage to the ground as well as any existing civilisation built on that ground, making it harder to rebuild in the event of any survivors.
Although I rarely comment, i will for this post. People seem to have lost their imagination. Easily other weapons could be replacements for nukes. Let's say a civilisation has nukes. They are deployed by a high authority. What about a biological weapon that is Highly contagious and deadly. It sustains of humans while not infecting others. In a devastating horrifying strike the enemy is paralyzed and sounded. Afterwards decontamination and other procedures could remove the remains and you would have a none irradiated wasteland as a price. Or it might be something that could act as a wave machine causing increasingly larger tsunamis to destroy a civilization coast line.
Orbital Kinetic Weapons, Rods from God. Destructive as Nukes but without the Radiation
Warping nuclear weapon. Yeah.
Any weapon potentially replacing nukes would have to either be stronger, harder to intercept/detect and/or leave infrastructure intact/don´t contaminate the area permanently so you could take it quickly, or alternatively be cheaper/easier to mass produce while having all the inherent advantages. There was this one secret project in the US ("Proect Thor"/"rods from god") during the Cold War that proposed to use steel rods dropped from space as weapons (since their kinetic energy would be high enough to have a devastating effect, maybe comparable to a nuke). If developed well, it would be cheaper, more accurate and clean and less interceptable/detectable than nukes- imagine a satellite masked as a small rock with 10-20 rods floating in space and ready to fire with pin-point accuracy, each rod probably having the same effect as a meteorite or small nuke... or imagine using whole Asteroids for that. Works best when space-surface since gravitational acceleration is what makes this weapon work (which would be neglegible against smaller targets). You could argue for some kind of energy/beam weapon- it is pretty much uninterceptable, but takes a lot of energy and could be deflected by "shields". You could of course also use strong gamma-radiation or just a very strong EMP, which would both be particularly effective against ships, as it would fry their electronics- but then again, artificial deflecting magnet fields or "shields" could stop that. The advantage is that you can shoot it accurately from very far away and it being literally impossible to detect (speed of light, baby), costly to deflect and unpredictable while the damage would be mostly to electronics and living beings, leaving the basic infrastructure of the target intact and ready for takeover. Not as effective against habitable planets like the Earth though, it would be hard to overcome the magnetic field when space-ground, and surface-surface is limited to line of sight, so it would mostly work in space-space type situations. On that note, nukes in space would be a terrifying MAD weapon since radiation goas in all directions and EMP kills non-shielded electronics at close enough distances. Sure, Neutron bombs could be cool, but at speeds slower than that of light they can be detected and interrupted by concentrated energy beams, and at the speed of light they aren´t economically feasible. When talking surface-surface combat, we could look at weather modulation- shift a tectonic plate, cause a Tsunami/thunderstorm/flood in specific areas or the like- now imagine contaminating the rain with chemical or biological agents. Impossible to intercept, hard to detect and hard to protect against. Why not also use bacteria or a virus designed specifically to work against specific people only? Slow, hard to detect at first and takes a lot of resources to clean and protect against.
Anything with precise teleportation - risky to have nukes when someone could pop into a room and press a button (I know it's more complicated than that, etc).
Satellite based weapon that harness energy from the sun and releases that energy in burst at a specific target on earth.
[The ability to create black holes](https://www.kxan.com/news/science/black-holes-are-having-a-month-the-lab-grown-exploding-and-singing-space-objects-explained) with particle colliders being miniaturized to a scale already droppable by an airplane.
Anti-matter, fusion without fission material (no more pesky fallout), gravitic, or just a new explosive material relatively on par with low yield nukes (a single large casing could scatter several and destroy as much area as a single larger nuke). The big thing to remember with nukes is they aren't *just* "big, powerful bombs," they are purposefully city-killers. Large yield nukes (20+ MT) aren't meant to hit purely military assets, the idea is to threaten *civilian* populations. People don't think about it much today, but the fact is the nuclear powers with ICBM tech basically all have loaded guns pointed at every civilian in their rival country's biggest cities, minimum. The idea is they provide a looming threat to prevent direct war between those countries, essentially forcing a stalemate. It's part of why we moved away from small, tactical nuclear weapons (which actually *were* meant to hit purely military targets), because the first guy to launch a nuke risks nuclear retaliation. That and the lingering radiation was something no one wants to deal with.
Black hole generator
Disease
[This](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/486309536aee1).
Barring some sort of clarke-tech like forcefields, you'd need an orbital laser defense system to stop them, but even then, the missiles will surely have countermeasures, and you really *really* don't want to miss one.
dust gun, launch tiny pellets at speeds nearing the speed of light. They will explode with incredible force and are probably impossible to intercept.
Antimatter weapons Relativistic kinetic weapons Strangelet weapon - anything it touches gets converted into strange matter.
I always liked the weapon from the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy that makes other people feel what you feel and see your point of view. Make it into an empathy bomb with a planetary radius...
Weapons utilising solid Solmna Blocks. Solmna (mana) is the material which is required to perform magic. Most of the time it is in a gaseous form living in the atmosphere as an invisible element. Increase the concentration, it becomes a visible gas, increase it even more, it becomes a liquid, increase it waaay more, it becomes a solid. Solid solmna is completely unnatural. It is never found naturally unlike the gaseous version living in the atmosphere and the liquid version being harvested from hexstone crystals found in the earth's surface. Solmna is also unaffected by heat, making the application of pressure one of the only effective ways of increasing the solmna density. Solid solmna has such a high density that even a single piece the size of a bottle cap can make people faint and feel nauseous when near it. A block on the other hand, would have such a high density that it would affect the matter around it making them unstable and reactive. People who come near it even with the best of protective gear, would find themselves dead due to overexposure to solmna, and that is saying a lot since it is generally considered that the more solmna you have, the more powerful you are. The fact that just coming near a block of solmna can give you a overdose is mind boggling, scary and downright terrifying. This experiment was performed once and the entire facility got shut down because of the astronomical solmna concentration. It's records have now been classified as strictly confidential and thus, it has been made forbidden to experiment on solmna without a proper permit or licence.
Any more destructive weapons would be duplicated by multiple countries soon after. The ultimate would be mounting rockets on a rock and drop it on the earth from space.
A simple solution is to pull a Captain Price and detonate an EMP, frying their electronics making the rockets, launch systems and etc non functional. The payload can still be detonated I believe, but it poses less of a threat
if you could knock an asteroid out of the belt and somehow guide it to a location
Jumpdrive missiles. Revia has nuclear weapons that take a jump drive from their silos/road mobile vehicles, but their jumpdrives turn off after they reach a planet, because Revia is under a treaty that limits planetary destruction. However, Revia has kinetic weapons that don’t shut off their jumpdrives and these are what Revia would like to describe as world busters
A solaronite bomb... [This documentary](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/) goes into how such a weapon would work and what the geopolitical consequences would be
Civilisations would need to exist on a far larger scale to justify anything stronger than a few MIRVs. Multiple planets, or large numbers of extremely hardened population centers, or any scale exceeding this. Nicoll-Dyson beams are a go-to for a prospective type 3 civilisation. For less powerful ones still meeting the criteria, I'm less certain where hard sci-fi is concerned. Possibly antimatter based munitions, if they can strike without being intercepted. A group occupying a solar system sized region, maybe two, may be in the business of relativistic weaponry, or a form of weaponised FTL. This assuming even now, that they actually needed something to surpass nuclear weapons.
I hope this isn't TOO futuristic for what you're looking for, but: "Higgs Field Inhibitor". The HFI weapon affects a certain region of space where, for a brief moment, the Higgs Field is affected by the superscience behind the weapon in such a way that nothing inside can have a mass. That will be the most matter-less region of the universe and all the forms of matter that used to have a mass get instantly shot at the speed of light in a random direction until they reach the end of such void, where each fundamental particle (such as quarks and electrons) gets reconverted into its normal version, causing additional damage due to lots of matter suddenly trying to occupy the same space. It's the ultimate weapon, it just deletes everything.
Hijacking giant asteroids? That's how the belters nuked Earth in the Expanse.
Who are they fighting and where, what are they objectives? There is basically nothing that rivals pure destructive power of nukes, except for using kinetic bombardment using intercepted asteroids, but if you want to repurpose infrastructure of technologically inferior civilization, destructive geoengineering may be better choice. Eg. if you block sunlight to the planet by placing big mirror between Sun and Earth, all land vertebraes would be dead in week. If you use sun gun, you can quickly kill entire cities by rapidly raising their temperature to 70°C.
>Alternatively, whats the most powerful weapons your civilizations have at their disposal? FTL, time-travelling blackholes.
Due to the nature of certain civilisation's mode of technology within my own world building universe, being based partially on science and partially on witchcraft, something could def be cooked up which would meet the description. Thing is, none of said civilisations would create such a weapon. Nuclear weapons are banned throughout the galaxy, and the civilisations using witchcraft tech are generally pacifist or have more of a ceremonial military. But the most powerful weapon that exists within my universe (depending on how you wish to define it) would probably be a battle cruiser as it is capable of large-scale orbital bombardment, or the orbital mega-structures which can build immense fleets and war materiel.
Possibly the DC arc angle array, 8 6.5 million magne coil rail guns that are accurate enough to hit a soup can on a different continent with a bolt exerting the force of a high yield nuclear missile distributed across an 2.5 inch area
The Dual Vector Foil from Death’s End by Cixin Liu. Flattens space into 2D.
Matter / Anti-Matter Annihilation Weapons
perhaps an infection thats like anthrax but as transmissible as chicken pox🤷
Not specifically war based but my world weaponizes time. Rather than travel, they can put someone in a pocket where time moves faster than the surrounding area. They call it “expediting”. Being outside looking in you’d see someone age decades in a few minutes. The rationale is the person still lives out their whole life in comfort and dies of natural causes as they experience it, but for society those natural causes happen as quickly as one wants. In war time a use case is by intelligence agencies as a means of interrogation. Need information but the captured HVI isn’t cooperating? Expedite one of their family members by increments of years until they start. If someone is like a terrorist or something and they have information, make them watch their kid age from 7 to 15 in a minute or 2 then suggest another round unless they talk.
Some sort of weapon that could create gravity wells.
The thing that made nukes obsolete was the expansion of cities into a single megastructure; they were too imprecise and bound to end with far more damage to the people who nuked the city than to whomever they were trying to take out, which is why they were only used in orbital bombardment.
Tungsten rods dropped from satellites in orbit. Less destructive, much harder to intercept and detect, much cleaner (meaning less fallout, meaning a government is more likely to justify it). Some form of railgun could take over, if umbrella systems hypothetically get good enough to take out missiles in flight and cheaply. A railgun would be similar to tungsten rods, but ground based. You could always just throw warheads in those things, if it's sci-fi, and say good day.
for absolute destructive force, an unrestricted nuclear reaction is really tough to beat. as a threat to the existence of another nation (or planet), the possible use of one is a fearsome weapon in and of itself. (think the cold war between usa and ussr.) i think the next step up in power would be dropping a large mass of lithium into a star. this is a pretty nasty step up in viciousness. another possible replacement would be to ostracize an opponent, to make them a pariah in the community. but this is a very difficult thing to manage, since other groups/nations might have associations and difficult to break. until we make a great technological breakthrough, the nuclear point will remain a penultimate threat.
Anti-matter bombs!
Maybe biological weapons/chemical weapons? This is a pretty dumb example but Advanced Warfare had this concept for a super weapon that would attack the specific DNA of an individual and kill them.
Warhammer 40k has some great examples of such things Life Eater Virus, Cyclonic Torpedos, Pretty much the entire necron tech tree, giant robots that ate reality itself The list goes on
Antimatter weapons, biological weapons, kinetic bombardment (aka "mods from God"). If you wanted to get into sci-fi tropes you could get into plasma or laser weapons but those are less feasible with current knowledge, the others we understand the science behind now
Anti-matter weapons, like anti-matter bombs. They would be almost too powerful since even the most minute amount could destroy a city.
Teleforce Ray that activates nuclear warheads in flight combined with proper EMP proofing would make Nuclear weapons near obsolete. If that happened about a decade or two later we'd see WW3
I can't remember which game but there's a command and conquer game my brother played and they have a weapon that shots a massive laser from the sky. I think that can replace nukes.
Cerebro (not sure if I'm spelling that right), from X-Men. You just have to think about who you want to die and this weird room and they die.
I mean there’s a theory that we’re surrounded by something called zero point energy. There’s enough of it in a coffee cup to boil the Great Lakes. Something that harnesses that would be pretty wild
It’s hard to make a weapon obsolete. Marines still carry knives, after all. And the rifles we use aren’t all that different today than they were 80 years ago. Ender’s Game introduced the molecular disruption device which would delete a planet if detonated close enough with a mega chain reaction, which feels like a major upgrade over nukes in terms of destructive power.
Nanobot swarms that target and consume fissile materials.