"'Harder on the countryside, I suppose,' he added. 'We felt free to use nukes there. They sure chew up a landscape, don't they?'"
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 10.
Chew up? Anderson describes a formerly cultivated, now crater-pocked valley where square kilometers had burned and most of the fields had been irradiated. Fire and fallout had also hit some of the wilderness beyond although Ridenour is soon flying over untouched forest - untouched only because there has not been an all-out exchange of nukes.
Despite their concern for the environment, the outbackers use nine captured nuclear rockets to destroy the captured and evacuated city of Domkirk, leaving only a large vitrified crater surrounded by burning fields. Not good, whatever cause it was meant to serve.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Not good, nukes being used as weapons? I agree, BUT, human beings what we are, I fear they will be used. And if they are going to be uses, I hope they will be used only for military reasons against legitimate military targets. And that low yield, tactical nukes with rapid half lives are used.
Sean
Nuclear weapons are just very powerful explosives with some temporarily toxic byproducts. Weapons are meant to kill and destroy, after all -- atomics are labor-saving, but they don't kill you any deader than a pike or a wooden club. In Rwanda not so long ago they managed to kill a million people with nothing more sophisticated than machetes.
Curtis Le May's firestorm raid on Tokyo killed more people in a single night than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki; it just needed many hundreds of bombers dropping incendiaries rather than one bomber with a fission weapon.
Area bombardment is probably obsolete, though.
Greater precision means that bombs get smaller, not larger -- you don't want to use anything bigger than necessary, after all.
Most traditional bombardment devices compensated for lack of accuracy by throwing lots of explosive in the enemy's general direction.
Testing has shown that using PGM artillery shells increases the effectiveness by 25x, roughly -- or to put it another way, you can use 1 shell with a probable error radius of 5 yards rather than 25 shells with an error radius of 500 yards. The difference is even greater for bombs.
If you can knock out a city's power and water networks with precision munitions, you've taken it off the board as a functioning entity without burning it down or reducing it to a crater.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with you and that is basically what I was trying to say. Nukes ARE simply powerful explosives with some temporarily toxic byproducts. And if I recall correctly, the Imperials in "Outpost Of Empire" did use small, low yield, tactical nukes with short half lives against Arulian military forces on Freehold. That too is a precision use of nukes.
Yes, you don't NEED sophisticated weapons to be brutal and genocidal as the hideous example you cited from Rwanda showed.
I am TRYING not to be in naive awe of nukes! Not to "supernaturalize" nuclear weapons, which are merely powerful explosives.
Sean
Post a Comment