Thoughts on nuclear landmines?

The concept I like better is nuclear powered structure (eg. "defensive" turret) or slow moving vehicle (heavy tank) with beam weapon (laser cannon, railgun, etc.) controlled completely by AI. You place in on a spot (or in patrol area), set it to shoot anything that classifies as target and it will go... well, nuclear, if ever destroyed.

Hell you could have one in post-apocalyptic setting revered as a "seat of god" by some primitive culture that settled around - it ignores them because they are not a threat and shoots down anything dangerous in miles around (which they happily misinterpret that it's protecting them).

Really overkill, and you'd want to keep it under observation. Otherwise some twat will come along, dig it up, and now your enemies have a nuclear landmine.

Needing chickens is a bit of a design flaw

Landmines act as "area denial," right? You might as well just set off a conventional nuclear weapon in the area that has long half-life stuff packed into it, or even a dirty bomb.

They are decent counter to Titans, I guess

A waste of resources
You're better off dropping that bomb on some heavily abitated zone or an important production center in enemy territory.

Only if they're able to be triggered by infantry, we wouldn't want anything getting through the line

Back in the days of Soviet Union, the scientists had this lovely idea of a doomsday device - all the used fuel from nuclear power plants will be put on a (otherwise unarmed and officially decommissioned) battleship together with a low yield bomb. The ship will be controlled by the most loyal of the commissariat and will sail around the oceans on a track known only to a chosen few. Should Soviet Union ever lose, it will detonate, irradiate all life on Earth and presumably bring forth the next Ice Age by evaporating enough water to throw global ecosystem completely off the rails.

Fortunately they came up with the under Gorbachev's rule, who forbid the whole idea. If Stalin heard of this he would have ordered to make three and automatically detonate the last one if the other two ever stopped responding.

You might be able to make the area unlivable, but it takes a lot of that stuff to make it so no-one can pass through.

What? Can you provide source for that?

Nothing more solid that what a google search for "soviet doomsday ship" provides.

Really says something about the cold war that that's not the craziest, possibly not even the second craziest nuclear weapons idea that I can think of.
(The Pluto SLAM, and the Convair X6 and it's Soviet equivalent, respectively )

So just a nuclear weapon packed with that isotope of cesium which is particularly deadly for several decades, then.

Atomic land mines were tiny, usually with only a few kilotons worth of yield. The Army wanted to use them for demolition purposes at one point.

landmines? stupid idea

anything you'd face that's capable of triggering a device like that - which a device like that would be necessary to stop - has already beaten you if you're forced to resort to such desperate measures; think 1950s War of the Worlds

as a dead man's switch? better idea

under enemy territory, maybe a compact device sneaked into an enemy city and assembled there by a very small team - the radioactive component can be brought in a diplomatic bag; and every x hours you simply reset the clock, until you don't

bye-bye the enemy city

you can even put it so close to someone else's embassy that when it goes off you'll be able to blame them and avoid the retaliatory strike while your enemies fight among themselves to the point of weakness

but as a landmine, no, outside of Fallout-style mini-nukes, and even then - it's called Fallout for a reason

It was my understanding the "doomsday ship" was actually permanently moored at a single location, and would 'only' throw enough radioactive material into the air to contaminate the whole planet, not actually trigger an ice age or vaporize a large portion of the sea.

>bye-bye the enemy city
I think you're vastly overestimating how powerful these things were.

The only 2 used in anger were so devastating in large part because of how poorly made the buildings they took out were. There was one guy only a few hundred feet from the blast who was saved because he was crouched behind a brick wall, and the variants used for land mines had a fraction of the yield of those two.

America would've gone TWE on Japan if they did work.

Fun for the whole family.

Awful idea, we've learned through testing that an airburst is the best way to nuke something, and burying it in the ground as a mine is the opposite of that.
Air dropped mines are far better at area denial and you don't need a ground presence. Just sprinkle bombs around.
Mines are a bad idea anyways, unless you're fighting in a shitty area and you have a sick plan to clean 'em up, and some way for all of your guys to know where they are 100% of the time.

>enemy digs it up
>they now have an extra bomb
>they just throw it out of an airplane like normal people

>"the most powerful weapon in our arsenal"
>Makes japan looks like swiss cheese after a few rounds
>Strong enough to create a massive EMP blast and make cars kilometers away fly

And why exactly would a nuke be better?

An N2 mine was literally a nuclear weapon with no radiation, user, which was why they were used on conventional soil.

Also, this moored ship was set to detonate automatically once certain conditions were met, or so I think.

>airburst is the best way to nuke something

Suspended nuclear air-mines then?

Well, if we're throwing Geneva Conventions out of the window we might as well look into Anthrax mines, or Sarin mines or myriad of other chemicals that reliably kill people but leave infrastructure unharmed.

Most militaries have pretty good CBRN defences, these days.

, The development materials suggest that N2 mines are basically equivalent in power to a nuclear fission bomb without the fallout.
However, AT Fields can keep out pretty much anything unfortunately.

>Object 279

>Its elliptical shield also helped prevent it from overturning from the shockwaves of any possible explosions of the nuclear kind.

What now?

There's still a few nasty things that you can hurl at modern CBRN gear. Blister agents come to mind.

>The Pluto SLAM
Oh God, that thing. If there ever was a proof that during the cold war you could get any military project, no matter how insane, funded as long as you included "we can use it to kill communists" into your presentation.

For those unaware, it's essentially a giant nuclear-powerd nuclear missile that shits out smaller nuclear missiles while flying at supersonic speed at low altitude (so that it'd be undetectable with long-distance radar; the fact that the pressure wave of it passing overhead would be enough to kill people and that its unshielded reactor contaminated everythign it flew over was considered a bonus).
The plan was that if the cold war turned hot and USA was about to get annihilated in a nuclear holocaust, as a final act of "fuck you, commies!" they'd release this infernal machine to fly on a pre-determined course over USSR, nuking eveyr major city, irradiating everything it flew over, and finally crashing into Moscow or other high-priority target so that its reactor would be breached and contaminate the surroundign area with enough radioactive waste to make it completely unlivable for the next several centuries.

The project actually got to the point where they built a prototype of the reactor meant to power the thing, and were considering building a small-scale prototype to test it in action. It was only at that point that anybody realised that they had no way to actually test the thing, because nobody would want it flying in the same continent they lived on. Plan to tie it to a big pole in the middle of the Nevade Desert was briefly considered, before being abandoned out of fear what would happen if the rope snapped (better hope it flies in the direction of something not important; nobody is going to miss Mexico, right?), and the project was quietly scuttled.

Still, it's not quite as dumb as the proposed nuclear-powered bomber, since at least in this case the fact that it would irradiate everything around it was intentional.

I don't think you get how big we can make fusion bombs now a days. We can do Armageddon level booms.

Modern fission bombs are not that bad in fallout.

Why?
Not questioning the idea in general but literally asking what scenario this would be useful in over other methods? I mean besides against fictional super robots and monsters.

>Bouncing Betty nuclear mines
Now we are talking

Somebody actually calculated the yield of the N2 mine in the first episode of Evangelion (you get pretty good shots of the explosion and the crater, so the size of the blast can be determined with reasonable accuracy). It's roughly equivalent to a decently-sized A-bomb (i.e. fission based, like the ones dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). However, modern H-bombs (fusion based) would be at least an order of magnitude, if not several, more powerful.

I am now naming a raging barbarian BBEG of a campaign Pluto Slam

The real issue would be using stronger bombs in a civilian area, considering every angel, save... 2, iirc, showed up within miles of Tokyo-3, an inhabited metropolis.

And if N2 mines are, as various material implies, antimatter bombs, there is no hardcap on their size either.

You're telling me that nukes are better than everything just because we can make big nukes? In a setting with giant armored cyborgs, gravity-well exiting railguns, dimensional rifts and various aliens?
And that only with the original series. The rest has very blatant power creep.

Evangelion setting has nukes (Jet Alone having a nuclear reactor & Tokyo being nuked before the start of the series).
N2 mines are the most potent (non-Eva) weapon possessed by mankind in EVangelion.
Therefore N2 mines are more potent than nukes. Syllogism, oh.

Quality post. I bet /k/ loves this thing.

Why not just load a nuke on a SUV driven by robots? Better results, less loss of your own soldiers, and you can have the robot press the button to give yourself a step of mental seperation from the atrocity you've committed.

>Trusting the robots with nukes

Because that would be efficient.

there was a russian cartoon about that.

current bomobs are orders of magnitude then those experimental devices from 70 years ago.

Because if the robots get disabled somehow you now have an SUV full of nukes lying around completely undefended.

What if we set it up so if the SUV dips below a certain speed for too long the nukes go off.

Resolving this peacefully was the most dumb idea evar. We could've had so much fun!

I don't know what's more terrifying, the fact that this was seriously considered an option and even got so far as to have a prototype made, or the thundering erection I get from imagining this crime against humanity in action.

Because if some idiot rear-ends the thing your nukes go off at the wrong time.

>a prototype
Only prototypes of the reactor-engine were made, not the airframe (they used heated and pressurised air to emulate the conditions needed for the ramjet to work).
But yes, there was a nuclear ramjet engine that was tested for about 5 mins at max power out in the Nevada test site, so it got to that point.

Bonus points for the testing at Jackass Flats, because sometimes life just hands these things out

Speed reboot.

>you have a sick plan to clean 'em up
Just include a timing mechanism that deactivates the mine after some time. You know when it would be safe to cross the minefield, enemy does not. That's how it works with air dropped mines.

youtube.com/watch?v=NnJbtbh4tDE

Can you make them a nuclear directed energy weapon?

You think that shit was bad?

Salted nukes.

Nukes loaded with cobalt. The cobalt will suck up the radiation of the blast, evaporate into cobalt gas in the explosion, and cover the entire planet in fast-irradiating heavily radioactive micro-sized cobalt droplets.

When you hear about "we have enough nukes to kill Earth 300 times over", people aren't talking about regular nukes. They are talking about what would happen if you would convert regular nukes in salted nukes.

Luckily, no one has ever built a salted nuke. Hell, even testing a salted nuke is a human extinction-risk event.

> If there ever was a proof that during the cold war you could get any military project, no matter how insane, funded as long as you included "we can use it to kill communists" into your presentation.

And yet, the Orion Nuclear Pulse Drive Battleship never came to be.

>It is like a naughty little boy lighting a firecracker under a tin can. Except the tin can is a spaceship and the firecracker is a nuclear warhead.

>We had a design to reach Saturn in 1959.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns2.php#id--Project_Orion

Well, in Salavation War nuke worked horribly right on angels with their super-regeneration giving them instant super-cancer.

desu with the low-fallout bombs we have today I could see making a one or two use lift system to get a couple really big things into orbit with this. Like the core of a massive spacebase.

I'm honestly kind of sad we don't have megaton-yield weapons anymore. Not that I want nuclear war, but if we do destroy civilization we might as well do it as flashy as possible.

Sure, multiple hundred-kiloton-yield warheads loaded onto a MIRV is far more practical than a single warhead with an equivalent total yield but I wish we'd kept a few of the really big motherfuckers anyways. Nothing like the testicle-retreating beauty of one of the Castle-series detonations.

It could carry 10 International Space Stations in a single lift-off.

I realize how socially unsettling it is, but the missed oportunities still make me sad sometimes.

How bad is it that I read 'Propellant Dick' the first time I looked at this?

My favorite crazy atomic contraption is the Orion nucler pulse propulsion drive (which does exactly what the name implies: effectively, it's a rocket that flied by dropping nukes behind itself and riding the "blast wave"), because unlike every other example of atomic wackiness it's not only completely practical, but also useful for something other that wiping mankind off the face of the planet.

Now, to understand why a rocket the flies by shitting out nuclear explosions can be called "practical" instead of "completely insane", you need to know a few things about spacecraft drives. I may be an engineer but I'm not a rocket designer, so I don't even pretend I can explain it in detail, but there's basically two big things you have to consider when building an engine for your space ship. One is acceleration, and the other is delta v, which is your ability to alter your speed, and which in space directly determines your max speed (since the longer you can keep accelerating, the faster you'll end up going).
Normally the two attributes are like the opposite end of a sliding scale: you can optimize for one, but the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. One one end of the scale you have your traditional chemical rockets. Great acceleration, but you burn your fuel very quickly so your delta v is very limited. On the other end of the scale you've got ion drives: thrust roughly equivalent to a mosquito's fart, but you use so little fuel that you can keep accelerating for years or decades (i.e. you have really high delta v), so you'll reach immense speeds if you can afford to wait long enough.

And then there's the Orion drive, which says "fuck you!" to all that bullshit and does both at the same time while riding a wave of nuclear fire and presumably doing a kickass guitar solo. The energy released by a nucler blast it so huge that the craft managed to not only have ridiculously high acceleration, but extremely good delta v as well.

the only problem i see on that it tat its a exclusively inter planetary/inter system ship drive, radiation s not just the only concern here, a ship thaat needs such engine need to be BIG and that engine only has on and off, no way of regulating speed or manuver without a big burst of speed

in short good for long drives, bad for everything else

I wouldn't really consider that a problem. Making a craft do both orbital launchs and actual space flights is actually a terrible idea, since the requirements are so different (the acceleration vs delta v problem again). Ideally you'd want one kind of craft for getting things to orbit, and then an entirely different one for getting things to Moon or Mars or wherever. Now, the Orion actually could o both, because it produces so much thrust it can just ignore the normal limitations, but that doesn't mean it should (especially since every landing and takeoff is going to turn the area into a glass parking lot and cause a statistically noticeable upswing in cancer-related deaths). It's a drive that lets you get to Mars in a week and Alpha Centauri in 50 years; it doesn't need to be practical for driving to the grocery store or taking a short jump to the International Space Station.

yeah its a spacetruck engine, made for long hauls and lift off, but alone, it sucks for anything that needs a slow and/or precision manouvering, like docking

what if there's a traffic jam

Good luck trying to turn, buddy.

This, modern nukes are very clean.

The issue we have now isn't so much the radiation, but the dust kicked up that could fuck up the environment.

Road rage on a scale never seen before.

Though not a doomsday device, bomb-pumped lasers are interesting in that the nuclear warhead detonation is incidental to the main effect of the weapon. What matters more are the multiple x-ray lasers mounted to the casing, which will pick individual targets. Intended for orbital Ballistic Missile Defense, once each laser had a target, the bomb would go off, with the warhead's X-ray flux powering each laser briefly, but strongly. Great one-shot design.

Another thing that comes to mind is relativistic Kinetic Kill Vehicles. An object with equivalent mass to a can of coke would impact with around eight megatons.

Yeah, but you have to accelerate it to that speed in the first place.

Which makes me wonder: If you start with a launch armature in space, and use an Operation Plumbbob-style projectile, could you use multiple nukes in series to accelerate a small-ish projectile to relativistic speed?

But if we used magic (or some really impossible science) the whole thing would be easier. Just put the thing in a vacuum chamber, align the falling object perfectly to the earth, and drop it between two portals. Should reach relativistic speeds within a year, with around 1,280,190 seconds to spare.

About as useful as nuclear depth charges.

I mean, what do you use that for, killing a large school of whales in as little time as possible?

It's tough to know exactly where a submarine is, but if you know a general area, the water hammer will crush the fuck out of it for you. As an added benefit, it'll crush submarines you *didn't* know were there too.

I'm more interested in the possible invention of nuclear blimps.

There's a reason that most countries replaced them with mark 54 torpedoes though

>I mean, what do you use that for, killing a large school of whales in as little time as possible?

Yes. Fuck the ocean and everything that lives within.

>implying the US and other allies don't already have something nearly identical

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)

>Blimp powered by dropping nuclear bombs and riding the shockwave
That's some kind of

Only the larger ones. Anything small enough to be used as a mine has an incredibly small yield.

It doesn't need to turn. It'll go straight to Berlin.

>believing Illuminati propaganda

Maxim 37: There is no "overkill." There is only "open fire" and "reload."

schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries

We John Ringo up in here.

I feel your pain anons. I'm pretty into nuclear politics, but I find it hard when people assume that I'm into non-proliferation and pansy stuff like that, and I can't say anything because then I'm a sociopath with no regard for human life.

But seriously, if we gave every country nukes and had an agreement that any attack on another country would result in nuclear obliteration, war would be solved in a snap

Trident only nukes the target. Pluto nukes the target and Chernobyls everything under its flight path.

One flight plan included setting it up to just trace figure 8s across the USSR until it was shot down (because it'd take over 40 days for it to use up it's reactor and crash).
Yeah, arms control treaties.
Delta V is acceleration potential.

The second component to the suitability of a rocket fuel, beyond plain test stand thrust, is exhaust velocity. The faster your exhaust velocity, the better your rocket will work at extreme velocities.

60% of an Orion Drive's thrust is from photons. So the Orion drive will work better at high speeds than any chemical rocket or ion drive ever made.

>a giant nuclear-powerd nuclear missile that shits out smaller nuclear missiles while flying at supersonic speed at low altitude
>the fact that the pressure wave of it passing overhead would be enough to kill people and that its unshielded reactor contaminated everythign it flew over was considered a bonus
>to tie it to a big pole in the middle of the Nevade Desert was briefly considered
AdMech would be proud.