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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.'"
Best bomb to drop on California: The Nude Bomb
Worst bomb to drop on DC: The Nude Bomb
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The truth is there is no such thing as a spooky or scary weapon. A non-naive look at the world shows that human beings really don't care about what happens to the rest of the world, as long as the effects aren't felt at home.
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.
Or maybe I've just lost all faith in humanity. Either way, society already turns a blind eye to the atrocious acts of mankind. A little more torture and murder won't change the way those in power control the planet and its inhabitants.
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.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
The Bombarang was developed in the 1970's, and while technically a success, development on the project was canceled due to unforeseen consequences.
C'mon, you werent expecting one Tom Cruise/gay/phallic symbol joke?
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.
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
I was just reading about this randomly on Wikipedia the other day. A US invention
This sort of opposes the Japanese developed Balloon bomb.
Of course both didn't exactly become conventional weaponary.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
The gay bomb was fabulous!
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Would the Upkeep bouncing bomb from the Chastise mission during WWII fit on this list at all? Its certainly more 'spooky' than some others on that list (airborne laser, vehicle defence et al).
Coincidentally, yesterday was the 65th anniversary of the missions, and there was a reenactment at the dam in the UK that the Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron trained at. They were to later be called the Dambusters.
Video footage here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7405514.stm
Even though many militaries of the past have been particularly successful because of it.
There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.
Ander
@=
They're natural rather than artificial tools, but they're tools nonetheless. You are also a tool.
...are we gonna get a newspost about weapons on slashdot that DOESN'T mention "the gay bomb"?
Particles, stuff that matters.
w[=ae]pen; akin to OS. w[=a]pan, OFries. w[=e]pin, w[=e]pen,
D. wapen, G. waffe, OHG. waffan, w[=a]fan, Icel. v[=a]pn,
Dan. vaaben, Sw. vapen, Goth. w[=e]pna, pl.; of uncertain
origin. Cf. Wapentake.]
[1913 Webster]
1. An instrument of offensive of defensive combat; something
to fight with; anything used, or designed to be used, in
destroying, defeating, or injuring an enemy, as a gun, a
sword, etc. Sounds very much like teeth, claws, or stings.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
By Monty Python: The Funniest Joke in the World
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 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.
I was once a horse.
I dont quite get it... They are supposed to be dropped from a sattelite and fall to earth with the power of a nuclear weapon... But if you drop them, won't they just remain in orbit? Or will a tiny push be enough to get them down to earth?
...."Have you mooed today?"...
I guess Atomic Bomb kinda covers it, but still, hardly a respectable list.
Those WMDs that Iraq had were spooky, you couldn't even see them!
Deze sig is in 't Nederlands geschreven.
Drop countless leaflets for Home Re-fi, Viagra, Penis Enlargement, Earn 1000$ a DAY AT HOME, You won a Free Gift Certificate, and help me get my Millions out of Nigeria. Then while all the soldiers are busy trying to sort thru real communications and your leaflets... attack amid the confusion. Even if it didn't work, at least the military would be better funded thru it's enemies ;)
Whenever I used a frisby I tend to think how it would be cool to put knives around the edge and let them flick out from the centrifugal force. I am not an especially violent person (though I do enjoy martial arts movies and occasionally martial arts as well), I just think it would be an interesting weapon :p Frisbees are great fun on their own, and very intuitive to curve and direct once you have your throwing techniques down properly, so they'd probably make pretty good delivery systems for explosive and such in certain situations. You want to be careful about the wind if you're going to launch at a steep angle though, otherwise you may find that your frisbee is acting more like a boomerang :)
which is totally what she said
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.
I guess Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Musashi got it all wrong then.
Pesky Turks preventing your Dardanelles invasion? Needs more gay sex.
Can't fight both the Russians and their winters? You guessed right: Not enough gay sex involved.
Roadside bombs in Iraq continually blowing up your troops? Guess what? I've got a fever! And the only prescription...
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
while scary, the airborne laser has only been used to fill a house with popcorn.
In reality, they clearly aren't as bad as all that; Hiroshima certainly isn't a deadly wasteland today. But I'm talking about popular perception here, not scientific reality.
The Thermobarbaric bomb.
Works the same way dynamite kills fish in a lake. Liquefies your organs. Nasty stuff.
Also, they left out cluster bombs. --The munition which kills and terrorizes civilian populations long after the war is 'over'.
They got the one about crowd control right, though. But the creepiest are the ones you use to screw up the nervous systems of people through the electro-magnetic sphere. (Even though, according to the cell phone companies and half of Slashdot, humans are not affected by non-ionizing EM. Whatever.)
-FL
In addition, modern nukes are much cleaner than the dirty bombs that were dropped on Japan. Hydrogen bombs actually have almost no long term fallout. Unfortunately they never use straight hydrogen bombs, they are always part of the three stage "Trinity" Thermonuclear devices, which are quite dirty due to the third stage.
What's scarry is of course, that the first stage of a "trinity" device is small enough to fit in a briefcase, and level a city block. But that has nothing to do with it being nuclear and everything to do with it being a tiny bomb that could disintigrate most of a city block. As I recall, it "burns" the nuclear fuel almost completely, and as a result has little to no harmfull fallout. It's barely even radioactive, since it's mostly all alpha emitters, might not even register. Don't want to inhale plutonium dust though, that can't be good for you.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
The weapon that caused the most damage in Japan during World War II was the M-69 incendiary cluster bomb, which started hundreds of fires from a single bomb casing that spread out nearly 100 little incendiary devices. Given that Japan's cities at the time were mostly built of wood, that's why low-altitude incendiary bombing at night was so devestatingly effective against Japanese cities.
I often wondered why Japan didn't improve fire safety regulations after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, which a large fraction of the 143,000 dead was caused by uncontrolled fires AFTER the earthquake.
I hate those fucking things.