The World's Spookiest Weapons

DesScorp writes "Popular Science has a piece on some outrageous ideas for weapons; some came to fruition, and others didn't. And while some of the weapons (atom bombs, chemical weapons, bats with bombs strapped to them that seek out homes and buildings at night) are truly frightening, some of them are also kind of silly, such as the Gay Bomb, and the Frisbee bomb that was labeled the 'Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition.'"

The best and the worst...

Best bomb to drop on California: The Nude Bomb
Worst bomb to drop on DC: The Nude Bomb

Re:The best and the worst...

I'm afraid that bomb got dropped 28 years ago. And it was a stinker. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/ [imdb.com]

Not very complete

They missed a few. Nazi sound and compressed air weapons, the first "shoot around a corner" gun. The "Amerika Bomber" concept that Heinlein liked so much that he based a lot of his future history series around the concept.
The american Gyrojet rocket pistol.

Re:Not very complete

I'd quite like to see George Bush fight a war on malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care rather than a war on 'terror'..

Not mentioned in this

The Bombarang was developed in the 1970's, and while technically a success, development on the project was canceled due to unforeseen consequences.

They Missed Some

21. The Slashdot - Unleashing hordes of un-/poorly-informed armchair scientists|lawyers|doctors|engineers|*, causing chaos and confusion with their variety of often conflicting and/or innacurate information, recipes, opinion, straw-men, and/or social advice.

Pigeon Guided Bombs in World War II

My grandfather, who served in the Navy during WWII, told me that pigeons were trained to peck at images of ships on a screen. The trained pigeons were then used to guide bombs dropped on Japanese ships.

The screens were covered with grids of fine wire. The pecking would cause a horizontal wire to touch a vertical wire, completing a circuit and providing the course correction to the bomb's electronics.

Crowd control?

Maybe it's just me, but what I think is the spookiest is not the weapons as such but rather how many of these appear to be explicitely intended for "crowd control".

Now of course, using non-deadly force to stop riots etc. is better than using deadly force. But at the same time, the fact that something isn't deadly - not intended to be, anyway - will also take away people's inhibitions to an extent and make them more likely to actually resort to it.

We're seeing this with tasers already, for example. And in fact, tasers are a good example insofar as that while the manufacturer would like to position them as non-deadly, they in fact are quite so.

Hey

The gay bomb was fabulous!

It shows just how much the military fears gay sex

Even though many militaries of the past have been particularly successful because of it.

They forgot "The Funniest Joke in the World"

By Monty Python: The Funniest Joke in the World [youtube.com]

Those WMD in Iraq

Those WMDs that Iraq had were spooky, you couldn't even see them!

Re:The truth is...

The truth is there is no such thing as a spooky or scary weapon

Actually, it's just the opposite. There's no such thing as a NON-spooky or scary weapon. If it's not a dangerous implement of death, it's not a weapon.

Re:The truth is...

What about a lead pipe or a carpenter's hammer? These aren't inherently spooky or scary, they're just tools - but I sure wouldn't want someone to enthusiastically apply either to my skull.

Can you imagine how much pain you could inflict with a standard dinner fork (provided the subject was sufficiently restrained)? Nobody would classify this as a weapon - and it certainly wouldn't inspire fear, until one had been used to pry your fingernails off.

I guess it just goes to show, it's not the weapon you're wielding that counts, it's how you use it...

Re:The truth is...

We could annihilate 5 billion people on the planet, but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected.

I can't really speak for North America, but people travel more and for me at least, between friends and business connections, there aren't many places in the world where I wouldn't be very concerned if something bad happened. E.g., Burma hasn't affected me, but I have (had?) friends in China I can't get hold of since the quake. That's just on a personal level, however so much of our business world is interconnected now, that thinking you won't be affected if half the world disappeared is incredibly naive - just pick most any non-trial, non-handmade product or service, and follow the supply chain...

Re:The truth is...

I thought that being connected was the thing preventing WWIII or somesuch until I read something about WWI. Back then nobility and high bourgeoisie where highly intermarried all over Europe. But still they 'decided' on a war that everybody at the time thought would be a brief kind of reassessment where they didn't think they had much to lose. Unfortunately (?) it bankrupted most European countries, signed the death toll of royalty in Europe (except on some weird island) and gave rise to the US.

Just look at the current situation in the US: the neocon start a war for the 'good' of 'merica and its net effect is that the US economy now belongs to China. Talk about being patriots !

Re:The truth is...

We could annihilate 5 billion people on the planet, but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected

No, we couldn't, because the US has moved most manufacturing overseas and is completely dependent on Europe and China economically.

Re:The truth is...

but the average person (at least in North America) would little more than flinch, so long as their own city or state is not affected.

I suppose this is true. I think it's partially because of becoming desensitized and not allowing it to affect onself too much because of the flood of these messages. Numbers also are meaningless to many; if one would report 3000 people being killed, noone would react. If one would give 1 person a face (documentary, reportage, ...) people would feel affected and connected. (disgust, confusion, empathy, ... depending on what's being brought across.)

This connection would fade over time though, as it's not related to one's own life. If someone in your family or environment dies, you're confronted with his or her absence on a regular base. The memory of some flickering screen is less strong and doesn't integrate or reconnect as strongly with your frame of reference as your own, direct experiences.

Perhaps it's a good coping and survival mechanism, to be able t shrug it off. If I wouldn't be able to shrug of the news I hear every day, I'd be unable to live my life; I'd be saving puppies and bulls in Spain, protecting seals on the north pole, trying to end world hunger, giving Russian futureless boys perspective to lower the crime rates, start an organisation to help people with difficult personal problems, fight at the side of the innocent in Iraq, protest at the White house for more US citizens rights, would pound my fist on the table in the parlement, reform the police, reshape the educational system, take away the need for fugutives to emigrate, spend my life finding cures against AIDS and cancer, shelter all the homeless, and build rockets to fly to Mars. (because that would be cool)

If I sum it up, it's almost like news is there to give you a feeling of helplessness, and accept the fact your influence in the world is limited and puny.

Re:The truth is...

Fourth paragraph from the bottom, $18 billion annually (for everyone on the planet) on cosmetics:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0111_040112_consumerism_2.html [nationalgeographic.com]

Iraq, $12 billion a month:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23551693/ [msn.com]

Hopefully you are just misinformed.

Re:They missed the worst weapon of all.

Without man, there would be no weapons.

O RLY?

How would you classify those things in a lion's mouth, those things on a bear's feet or that thing a scorpion carries around? They ain't musical instruments, that's for sure.

Re:They missed the worst weapon of all.

Are you suggesting that the lion, bear and scorpion were designed?

They taught that in school, so it must be true!

Re:They missed the worst weapon of all.

I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but I get tired of the whole 'man is the ultimate evil' thing, especially since a lot of the people who believe that back it up with baseless information. Plenty of animals, like bears, kill each other (even their young) under the right circumstances. Animals war with one another (amongst their own species) just like us. In fact, Planet Earth has a segment that shows two tribes of gorillas fighting over territory. Likewise, plenty of different species will fight over things such as food or mates.

Of course, a lot of these conflicts end with one party surrendering rather than death, but the same is true of humans. On Killing [amazon.com] does a pretty good job of showing how humans have a natural aversion to killing members of their own species (even in times of war) just like any other animal. And plenty of animals other than humans have been known to use tools. I'm too lazy to find the article, but I remember reading, about a year ago, an account of an ape using a bone to test the depth of the water in a river. It's safe to say that they animal kingdom has the same capacity for 'evil' as man. We just happen to be the dominant species and are very self-centered so no one pays attention to what the other creatures of the Earth are up to.

Re:They missed the worst weapon of all.

The worst weapon in existence on Earth is man itself. Man is the source of every weapon ever created. Without man, there would be no weapons.

Oh, what pitiful long-haired bullshit is this? Humans are not the be-all and end-all of violence in nature. Sure, we have the intellect to come up with very dangerous things. Sure, there are those dope-arsed enough to use these things. But as general violence in the animal kingdom goes, we're really quite the softies.

Take dolphins, the poster children of New Age flakies, often put up as these supposedly peaceful, gentle, intelligent creatures that could teach us a thing or two about being in harmony with nature. Bollocks. Dolphins are psychos: murder, violence, gang rape including bestiality and that of their own young --- you name it --- are all staples of dolphin behaviour. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near one of these fuckers without someone standing at the ready with a charged harpoon. Where are the dolphin justice mechanisms? If they're so peaceful and moral, where are the dolphin courts and prisons?

Ducks are just as bad. I was sitting by a pond the other day with about 20 or so ducks there. In the space of about half an hour or so, about six fights broke out, half of which were sexually motivated. In the same amount of time, over a hundred humans must've passed by --- a population in whom not one case of violence or sexual harassment broke out.

Re:Heinlein quote...

There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous video games.

There, fixed it for you.

Sincerely,

Jack Thompson

Re:The Rods from God

But if you drop them, won't they just remain in orbit?

Yes, absolutely. It is impossible to just "drop" something on earth from
a stable orbit - remember: You are already constantly falling.


Or will a tiny push be enough to get them down to earth?

I'd expect them to be rocket propelled rods to a certain extent.
Targetting will be a bitch though: You'd have to do a more or less controlled
reentry (tip forward, or the earodynamic breaking would mess with your speed) on
an arced trajectory, and very precisely hold on to your trajectory - even very
minor errors will make the rod completely miss the target.

The whole thing sounds interesting as an idea, but gets complicated very quickly as you
start thinking about an implementation.