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totallynotabrony


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Dec
1st
2013

Weapons of Mass Destruction · 10:17pm Dec 1st, 2013


Weapons of mass destruction - because I couldn't think of a good opening joke on my own.

I'll warn you right now, this is not going to be a pleasant blog.

Pinning down the exact definition of WMD can be difficult. Some people only know them as "that thing we invaded Iraq for." Title 18 of the US code says: any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors; any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector; any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life.

It goes on to define the term weapon and that gets really complicated. Simply put, a WMD does at least one of the following:
Uses and/or produces radiation
Uses biological material like viruses or bacteria
Uses chemicals that cause harm to living organisms


Left to right: Nuclear, Biological, Chemical

Having settled that, let's go into terminology. You'll sometimes hear the acronym NBC - nuclear, biological, chemical. Sometimes CBRN - chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear. (Some people classify radiological as different than nuclear. More on that later.) Sometimes even CBRNE - to also include explosives. You'll typically only see the E tacked on if the weapon needs an explosive charge to make it work. This comes up more often with improvised weapons.

Right then, on to the individual categories.

Nuclear weapons:
Let's start with the easy one- bomb goes boom, right? Nuclear weapons are actually more simple than you would think


This is basically the design of the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Basically, just slam two pieces of uranium together.

The more complicated Fat Man. It's still just a sphere of plutonium surrounded by explosives designed to blow inward, imploding the core.

Of course, the actual designs get way more complicated, especially with modern weapons that use exotic materials and boosting. The industry to obtain the materials takes a serious country. There are eight official nuclear powers in the world: China, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Israel probably has them. North Korea might.

Fun fact: South Africa is the only country to develop nukes and then give them up.

Nuclear bombs can be delivered by land and submarine based ballistic missiles. They can be dropped by gravity bombs and launched in artillery shells. They even had nuclear SAMs for taking out large groups of airplanes. Basically, if it existed in the 1960's there's likely a nuclear version of it. Lately, however, we've decommissioned a lot of those weapons, including the 50-pound "suitcase nukes." Yes, the snuke used to be a thing except in real life it was actually backpack sized.

Fun fact: A “hydrogen bomb” is another name for a thermonuclear weapon because it uses the heat generated by a fission bomb to compress and ignite a hydrogen fusion stage for extra boom.


The is a picture of the effects of IVY MIKE, the first hydrogen bomb test. That crater is 6,240 feet in diameter and 164 feet deep. IVY MIKE was the fifth most powerful bomb the US ever tested, and produced a yield of 10.4 megatons. CASTLE BRAVO was the most powerful US test, at 15 megatons. The most powerful bomb of all was the Soviet Tsar Bomba, at 50 megatons.

Radiological weapons:
Radiation, but without the big explosion of a nuclear weapon. These weapons are easier to obtain than nukes. They, like many of the weapons in this blog, are good at area denial. For example, General MacArthur wanted to lay down a belt of radioactive cobalt along the Yellow River to keep the Chinese out of Korea.

The “problem” with radiological weapons is that they don’t kill quickly. Even with a huge dose, a victim will notice symptoms in a few minutes and die within the day. Smaller but still fatal does can cause a victim to linger for more than a week. Symptoms (mild to severe) include: low white blood cells, restricted clotting due to low platelets, anemia due to low red blood cells, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, dizziness, headache, fever, diarrhea, shock, and seizures.


Or superpowers.

According to a firefighter at Chernobyl and a Manhattan Project worker, getting irradiated feels like a wave of heat or pins and needles on your skin and there’s an unusual taste in your mouth, like metal or a sour flavor.

The most likely way to see a radiological weapon used is in a “dirty bomb.” This is a regular explosive packed with radiological material. It wouldn’t be powerful like a nuke, merely spreading out in the blast to blanket the area with radiation.

Biological weapons:
Not much really to say: bacteria or viruses used for germ warfare. It’s been used since ancient times by throwing plague victims over castle walls or passing out Smallpox-infected blankets to the natives.

In the United States, a lot of bioweapons research was carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland. A lot of bioweapon history is super creepy to read about, particularly among the Soviets or WWII Japanese.


The happiest image of a gas mask I could find. And no, it’s still not very happy.

Bioweapons can attack an enemy’s crops. In this way, they are among the most selective WMD’s, able to be targeted at individual species.

Like radiological weapons, they don’t act instantly. Some germs can be fast, but not that fast.

Biological weapons are typically in powder or liquid form. They can be put in warheads to blanket an area when they release. There are also other methods, such as when Anthrax was mailed to people.

Biological weapons tend to be the most fragile of WMD’s. Even a little sunlight can kill some of the bugs. The aforementioned anthrax attack only killed five people, and the postal service has since begun using radiation to kill any stuff that might be in mail that goes to important people.

There’s some overlap with chemical weapons, as some toxins produced by organisms - such as ricin or botulism - are sometimes called biological weapons even if their effect is chemical in nature.


From what I see my friends talking about, most of you will probably get this joke.

Chemical weapons:
Bad juju, man. These are generally fast acting and unpleasant. There are a couple of main kinds of chemical weapons. They can be gaseous, powder, or liquid.

Choking agents like chlorine and phosgene stop you from breathing. This can be due to simply replacing the oxygen in the air, or by irritating your lungs and causing them to fill with fluid.

Blood agents like hydrogen cyanide prevent the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the blood and the body's cells. The blood of people killed by blood agents is bright red because their cells were unable to get the oxygen out of it.

Nerve agents like sarin and VX stop your muscles from responding to nerve commands. If you can’t control your body, you generally die because you can’t draw a breath. Meanwhile, your bladder and bowels are doing their own thing.

Blister agents like mustard gas cover your body in blisters.


That’s great, but the rest of your body won’t fare too well.

Like bioweapons, chemweapons can be put in warheads. Scud missiles and artillery can be used. You can also spray them. Herbicides for killing plants (like Agent Orange) and insecticides have a lot of the same ingredients as chemical weapons.

Okay, so we’ve covered the main types of WMD’s.

Defense against this stuff is difficult. Generally, a nice washdown with water can’t go wrong. For some of the chemical agents they make antidotes. Mostly you just have to be prepared and not go into the places where the WMD’s are. This is why they work so well as area denial weapons.

Conventions like Geneva and The Hague limit the usage of WMD’s although not all countries have signed and ratified them. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a big one. The NPT non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons and the NPT nuclear-weapon states in exchange agree to share the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology and to pursue nuclear disarmament aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals. India, Israel, and Pakistan didn’t sign it. North Korea withdrew from it.

Chemical weapons seem to be the most commonly used WMD’s. They were employed by Syria against its people in the civil war of the last few years. Iraq used them in the 1980’s against Iran and some of its own citizens.

In terrorist hands, chemical weapons are most likely. It’s not difficult to procure some of the ingredients to make them. Even if they didn’t kill a lot of people, the news that terrorists had used WMD’s would be a huge media frenzy. Next up would probably be a radiological dirty bomb, getting a medical or industrial radiation source and blowing it up.

But chin up. The fact that we have this stuff but it’s barely ever used should give you a little faith in humanity.

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Comments ( 40 )

You did forget MAD, and why exactly no civilized country would even use WMDs as first strike weapons

#2 · Dec 1st, 2013 · · ·

I still find it funny that the current U.S. ICBM's are 10 megaton bombs that incorporate the use of three large warheads in a nose designed to be able to hold up to ten should we change our minds. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were less than 1% of that strength, so that can tell you right there how much power a single ballistic missile can carry these days. They can strike anywhere on Earth since they're designed to go into an orbit trajectory as well.

All of this is 2deep'n'spooky4me.

WMD's are too stronk.

No doubts about terrorist groups using chemical weapons being the most likely. There was the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, after all.

What's next, IEDs? Improvised weapons?

1562208 Actually, the highest yield US ICBM was the Titan II, at nine megatons. Currently, even with multiple warheads, each missile is not usually capable of more than five megatons.

Yeah, nukes are simple, yet complex in nature. VERY scary in the sheer levels of destruction they can create. The Little Boy device dropped on Hiroshima killed over 100,000 people just from the blast and ensuing fires alone. And that was only 20kT. You can fit a 1MT warhead into a cruise missile nowdays. That is fifty times the destructive force. Detonate one of them at about 500-1000 feet above Central Park, and you have 6 million dead. A device in the 50MT range could be made to fit with the cargo hold of a typical airliner. The initial fireball would be about 8 miles in diameter. The base of the mushroom cloud would be over 25 miles across, and the height of the cloud would exceed 40 miles. At fifty miles distance, all buildings would be destroyed, and anyone standing outside would suffer 3rd degree burns.

I love (well, not love: maybe luke-warm like) how everyone says how devastating man-made weapons (in real-life) are, when they're not even remotely damaging on a truly large scale. If you want large scale, look up what the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs did in just one day.

Here's a link: dinosaurs were awesome, by the way.

If that happened... I'm not sure religions, cultures or countries would survive.

1562355 True. I feel it is only a matter of time till we start using kinetic war heads in that way let gravity do the work.

all this talk of weapons of mass destruction reminds me of that weapon from G.I. joe 2 that dropped a tungsten rod from orbit...that thing did some serious damage:twilightoops: and the thing is it is actually possible to build (expensive but possible).

I remember watching a special on the greatest failures of tested weapons; my favorite was a biological weapon, the mosquito bomb, which, as one can guess, released Mosquitos (testing didn't include the presence of West Nile or other diseases). The Air Force tested it over Georgia, and it works like a charm; that turned out to be the problem. Because it worked, Georgia now had over 50,000 new Mosquitos to deal with. Suffice it to say, it was a most unpopular test, and the weapon never saw full production.
Just another kind of Biological Weapon.

Weapons of mass destruction aren't a major problem nowadays. There are so many ways to protect against them that they're near ineffective. We can shhot down nukes, protect from chemicals and contain bio weapons. Even I own an NBC suit and several gas masks. There was a chlorine gas leak at our school and of the 20 affected, all were fine in a day or less. The real issue nowadays is the simple stuff. with £20, I could put together a 1.5 kg pack of thermite. Enough to derail a train or take out a power sub-station. With £500 and 2 or 3 other people, you could shut down a major power station for a good few days. It wouldn't take much to send a country into meltdown.

you know I didn't need to sleep anyway.

1562467 an impact from a Tungsten rod of the mass given in the movie would have to be accelerated to a speed of approximately 100,000 mph in order to do the damage it did in the movie... Not something we are capable of with the technology we have.

1563062 *sigh* hollywood and their dang inaccuracies...where is mythbusters when you need them lol

1563062>>1563133
transmissionsmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/rods.jpg
Whoever house it hits is going to have a bad day.

Actually, while biological weapons are fragile, the disease itself can also spread uncontrolled under the right circumstances.

1562467
1563062
1563191
Let's not forget the "Rods from God" a weapon of the same type used by America's Joint Strike Force in the game Tom Clancy's EndWar, which predates the use of similar weapons in the movie you mentioned and CoD: Ghosts.
static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100924143023/endwar/images/4/41/Rods_from_God.jpg
It's the JSF's WMD in the game, and launches a volley a dozen of tungsten rods roughly the size of telephone poles from orbit. The result is an absolutely devastating attack covering a relatively large area; the AoE is about 500 yards in diameter, and most buildings in that area are leveled, to say nothing of its effects on any allied or enemy units in the affected zone.

The rods are made of tungsten, and on their tip is a heat shielding material, most likely reinforced carbon-carbon. On the back of the rods is a rocket motor, which fires once the rod has separated from the satellite. The motor powers the rod until gravity accelerates it to a speed of 36,000 feet per second, through Earth’s atmosphere, eventually smashing into the crust. The rods are twenty feet long and one foot in diameter.
This, coupled with the speed, causes the crust to crack, spewing dirt and tearing up the ground as the shockwave travels, which is known to cause earthquakes.

1563191 imagine trying to claim insurance on that...

I couldn't say it better myself bender.

The thing that most disturbs me about the Mickey Mouse gas mask is that it even exists in the first place.
1563062 But, it IS possible. It is called an "Orbital Ballistic Projectile." (Thank you Clive Cussler! [plot point in his book Plague Ship]) I heard that the US and Russia played around with the idea. Also, the Iowa-class battleships probably had nuclear shells.
1562277 If you are doing IED's next, my dad used to help build the FMTV and FLTV that Oshkosh Truck is building. I can be of assistance. OK, what is 1 kT and 1 mT, respectively, in Lbs of TNT?
Also, keep up the good work. I find these posts to be very enlightening, and I like how you put the stuff in a way that a regular person can understand.

1563413
1kt = kiloton = one thousand tons of TNT
1mt = megaton = one millions tons of TNT

1563394>>1563413 The AoE of the weapon in the J.I.Joe movie was much greater than given in the games

1563463 I know. The main thing is that the technology is possible.

1563468 But there are much more effective weapons

1563500
The idea is that it can be on station at any time (planes and artillery need to be in the AO and be in range), cannot be intercepted (planes and missiles can be shot down, and artillery pieces can be attacked beforehand), deliver devastating firepower, and does not put American lives at stake when used.

The main prohibiting factor (other than the cost of putting the weapons in orbit) is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which the US and 97 other nations are signatory to.

1563500 True, but it was designed as a first strike weapon. Plus, there is no radioactive fallout, so an army can go into the area of destruction with no detrimental effects. The rod is also vaporized on impact, so there is no evidence that it was a tungsten rod, but it could have been a large meteor. Now, though, with the way the skies are monitored, it would be known that it was launched.

I'm trained to act in a CBRN environment, and all I can honestly say, is that I never want to. Ever. That shit is fucking scary.

1562202 Ah, Mutually Assured Destruction, or the reason why the Cold War never went hot. :twilightsmile:
1563133 You can have Reel Physics (an Escapist production).

1563397 Its basicly a glorified Bunker Buster. TCs EndWar got pretty close in realistic depiction.

1564346
Because say what you will about the Russians they weren't crazy enough to use them

You know, none of this stuff scares me as much as the largest IED ever found. Simply because for any country to use one of these, they expect to take on the world in a global slugfest which would not fare well for anyone. Oh and the missile defense system that the US doesn't have.

And the largest IED found was 61,500.

1564427 Not even shitloads of Vodka can annihilate the russian self-preservation instinct.

1564435 While our missile defense isn't what we would like, we certainly have something out there. We have a dedicated Missile Defense Agency which controls the Army's THAAD and GMD, and the Navy's Aegis BMD.

Also, the largest IED was 61,500 of what unit?

A little late to the party, but:

1564346 Here is the wikipedia article on Project Thor, AKA "Rods from God".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Thor#Project_Thor

1564519 You are welcome
1564427 I agree. These are the people who built the Tsar Bomba. A 50-58 MEGATON H-Bomb. The thing is, they built it in a LAYERED design, so they could make it more powerful! It didn't fit in any of the planes that they had at the time with out major work beforehand.

I'm surprised DHLS or the DOD didn't try to "make you go away" after this post.

Whew... lots of missile talk in this shit...

WMDs be scary yo... and all it takes is one psychopath to change their minds and decide to hit the big red button.

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