Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

[Marketeer]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

I believe that you are thinking of the movie "Independence Day."

 

Nono, Independence Day is proof that the aliens are allied with Canada.

 

 

[Patriot]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

And to our friends in the NSA, CIA, and FBI...

Hope you're enjoying the thread

 

Remember, We are just theorizing for a Roleplaying game!

[Nyrath]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

A high altitude detonation will have little effect on the ground, except for EMP.

The EMP effect could be major, depending on the location and height of the detonation. But that's a seperate matter.

More about EMP here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/5971/emp.html

http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/emp.htm

[jkwleisemann]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

Y'know... maybe it's just me, but I have to wonder what'd happen if you hit Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Maybe hit the stockpiles for nuclear/toxic waste too, on the theory that that'll vaporize what you find there and add it into the fallout that hits the world.

 

Y'know, just for kicks.

 

Though for the messianic villains out there, I'd say hit some of the world's CBW stockpiles. You make the point that you've got nukes and are willing to use them, and you get the PR boost of using nukes to destroy a potentially more destructive force out there.

[shadowcat1313]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

No, but most of Illinois a few hours north would be roasted in a nuclear attack.

 

Chicago - major population center.

Batavia - Fermilab

Rockford - production of vital airplane parts

Savanna - the Savanna Army Depot (I don't know for 100% certainty if it's still activly used, but I know that during the Cold War it used to house a fair number of nuclear weapons.)

 

 

Lets not forgot a rough 20 mile radius around the intersection of interstates 55 and 80, 3 refineries, 2 chemical plants, a nuke power plant, river network, and an army depot

[MilkmanDan]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

My wife's hometown. Kalona, Iowa. It's full of Amish. Who's best equipped to survive after a nuclear war? Cockroaches, then Amish. And cockroaches can't make butter. Think about it . . .

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

Nono, Independence Day is proof that the aliens are allied with Canada.

 

 

 

Geez, you burn down one foreign nation's lousy little presidential palace 'way back in 1812, and they never let you forget it.

 

And it's not like you guys didn't start it.

[OzMike]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=120

Your players will go insane while globe-trotting to foil the villain's Evil Plot at these various locations.

 

The idea was if you had a 1 megaton nuclear device, what are the top six places you could detonate it to cause maximum evil?

 

[1] Center of Tehran, Iran. Israel would be blamed, and the middle east would erupt into total war.

 

[2] Washington, D.C. While congress is in session. At the very least, every member of Congress would be wiped out, along with thousands of important ambassadors, lobbyists, political thinkers, and of course the Administration.

 

[3] Destabilize an oceanic shield volcano next to a methane clathrate deposit. This would make global warming 1000% worse.

 

[4] New York City, NY. Given the urban density, one could wipe out almost 1/300 of the entire population of the US.

 

[5] Knock off a chunk of Cumbre Viejo at La Palma in the Canary Islands. The tidal wave would cross all the oceans of the globe three times before they died out.

 

[6] Nuke the Yellowstone Caldera. This would create a megavolcano that would cover the US out to the Mississippi river with lava, and the ash cloud would stop sunlight for about a year.

 

[5]

 

Maximum evil? Or maximum disruption? Most seem to be leaning towards the latter. So I'll go for the former just to be different... For maximum evil I would choose places or events that don't deserve nuking at all through anything they may have done:

 

[1] Red Cross Camps - helpless refugeees and aid workers

 

[2] Romanian Orphanages - helpless orphans

 

[3] The Louvre - irreplaceable artworks

 

[4] Glastonbury Outdoor Festival - large number of people there to have a good time. A large number of musicians who would become legendary in death.

 

[5] 'Small Town', USA - 1 megaton would wipe it off the face of the map... for no reason at all.

 

[6] Orangutan Sactuary in Borneo (or wipe out the last of the Gorillas in Africa) - helpless animals/the last of their species

[Matt Frisbee]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

I'd opt for a smaller fission bomb as opposed to the 1 MT fusion weapon, then detonate it inside of or over a nuclear power plant. Since they are being forced to store spent fuel and radioactive waste on-site at most nuclear power stations, the seriously lethal fallout from such a blast would leave a large area completely uninhabitable for thousands of years.

 

Someplace like the Cordova Nuclear Plant near the Quad-Cities (Iowa-Illinois) when the wind is from the Northeast. A quarter million people downwind, a major ground transportation hub and a cluster of bridges over the Mississippi, not to mention the Rock Island Arsenal and all of that farmland around it...

 

Matt "Obscure-but-nasty" Frisbee

[Trebuchet]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

Remember' date=' We are just theorizing for a Roleplaying game![/quote']Speak for yourself.

[Guest daeudi_454]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

Eli Lilly has 3 plants (IN, CA, PR) that if destroyed, would likely result in millions of deaths from diabetes within a week or two.

 

New Delhi or Beijing would be prime targets: ridiculously high populations, and both nuclear armed.

Yangtze Dam (Four Rivers Dam?) or the Hoover Dam.

 

Oak Ridge, TN... Forest fire, speculation, plus already an atomic hotspot.

 

Atlanta: How long would the US survive without the warehoused drugs and other facilities of the CDC?

 

Somewhere NW of Paris (Including most of the UK), preferably that would have lots of dust/smoke generation to enter the Jet Stream, which would send radiation into France, Italy, Greece, Turkey.

 

One of the big dikes in the Netherlands would really screw them up.

 

A massive forest, East ot the Rockies... It would spread radioactive smoke across the country, and the fire would prob not be put out in our lifetime.

 

Mecca would cause WWIII in a heartbeat. Almost every Islamic on the planet would suddenly become extremists- and they are numerous and wide spread.

Mostly the same for the Vatican.

[Guest daeudi_454]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

My wife's hometown. Kalona' date=' Iowa. It's full of Amish. Who's best equipped to survive after a nuclear war? Cockroaches, then Amish. And cockroaches can't make butter. Think about it . . .[/quote']

[Homer]

mmmmm....

 

Butter

[/Homer]

[bwdemon]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

I don't want to know where they'll get the cream to make butter if all the cows are vaporized...

[Great Beyond]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

If I were out for sheer terror instead of stratgic strikes, I'd go for setting one off in a high profile location - say the Superbowl or the final match of the World Cup. Nothing beats watching a stadium of people being instantly atomized on live TV in front of 4 or 5 billion viewers (in the case of the World Cup, at least).

[megaplayboy]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

If I were out for sheer terror instead of stratgic strikes' date=' I'd go for setting one off in a high profile location - say the Superbowl or the final match of the World Cup. Nothing beats watching a stadium of people being instantly atomized on live TV in front of 4 or 5 billion viewers (in the case of the World Cup, at least).[/quote']

 

You'd want to set that off some distance away from the event, so that the transmission stayed on a few seconds.

 

I mean, we are talking about serious evil, right?

[Undertow]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

And to our friends in the NSA, CIA, and FBI...

Hope you're enjoying the thread

 

Enjoy? I hope they are taking notes.... and Al-Queda, Hezbolah, radical Militia Men, and any other terrorists are out getting coffee.

 

I do wonder how you would go about nuking the Yellowstone Caldera. I imagine it would require a sub surface detonation. Perhaps you could shove the bomb down old faithful like a musket ball of the gods.

 

If it was attempted I'm sure murphy's law would save us. The terrorist's might get eaten by a bear which would then need to be euthanised because it's a danger to mankind. That in turn would pi$$ off the E.L.F. or Earth First who would then blow the caldera themselves in reprisal for the use of chemical weapons on Yogy, Not to mention saving countless trees from sawblades.

 

Ahh.... Time for another vodka tonic.. with a prozac chaser.

[Mike W]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

If I were to run this scenario, I'd probably choose the following places(Editor's Note: I'm assuming the villain wants to conqueor the world, not destroy it):

 

1. Jerusalem - it's important to three major religions and the cascade effect of the resulting war in the Middle East could be used to my advantage.

 

2. Hollywood/LA/Southern Cal - population density kills millions, plus without Hollywood and the major television studios, there is an entertainment gap that could cascade economically as movie theatres and tv stations around the US suddenly have nothing new to show(or very little). This could cause a psychological backlash(how many people do you know eat up celebrity gossip? Now imagine taking it all away from them.). If I thought it would work, I'd just dump it in the San Andreas fault and cause "the big one" to drop half of California into the ocean - with the added bonus that a large percentage of Pacific shipping just came screeching to halt.

 

3. Zurich, Switzerland - let's see the banking industry recover from this one.

 

4. Canary Islands - for the tidal wave damage.

 

5. Russian oil fields - because with the Middle East in a war, they would be the next biggest producer(and I'm going to get some of South America fromt he tidal waves).

 

6. Kansas - wipe out the American breadbasket. You get a famine. On top of the global economic depression caused by the complete collapse of the oil industry.

[Marketeer]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

Geez' date=' you burn down one foreign nation's lousy little presidential palace 'way back in 1812, and they [b']never[/b] let you forget it.

 

And it's not like you guys didn't start it.

 

*Stage whisper*

 

Psst! Liaden!

 

...you know I'm in Canada, right?

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

*Stage whisper*

 

Psst! Liaden!

 

...you know I'm in Canada, right?

 

 

 

Oops! No, I didn't realize that.

 

In that case, wanna take a nostalgic trip to DC? You bring the accelerant, I'm packing the marshmallows and weenies.

 

(Oh, and if the FBI or CSIS really is reading this thread, Just Kidding!)

[Psylint]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

The San Andreas Fault?

 

Perhaps a nuke really would cause the big one that would cause the massive Pacific coast land slide, which in turn could create on heck of a tsunami. Plus, the fault line is a lot easier to get to than Chernobyl or D.C. during the State of the Union (both houses of Congress, the President, VP, most of the cabinet, and at least one Supreme Court Justice).

 

If an islamic terrorist organization detonated a nuke on U.S. territory, I'm fairly certain that the American people would demand a crusade against Islam, if only to move the battlefield from here to Mecca. It might even makes strategic sense, after all it would be hard to convince the suicidallly misguided to blow themselves up in shopping malls over here, if U.S. troops were drinking booze and letting their wives drive around the Dome of the Rock.

 

You know, if you hurt anyone bad enough, they'll go Mongol on your @$$. I'm fairly certain, that even the purported voice of reason would be shouted down, if not clubbed to death, under the toxic shadow of the mushroom cloud. At that point, I doubt arguments about "moral high ground" or "human rights" will have any traction. It'll be all "We do what we have to do" and "We'll entertain such quaint luxuries such as morality when we've finally killed all the yellow dogs."

 

The country will stand upon a precipice and willingly fling itself over in a orgy of xenophobic unthinking bloodlust. And in the end, if the killing and raping and maiming ever does end, the only ones left will be those whose conscience is so immune to cognitive dissonance or whose moral sense is so eroded, that the difference between the survivors of this tragedy and its instigators will be more a matter of efficiency and quantity than character and quality.

 

Personally, I hope that whatever divinity is out there grants them the wisdom to see at least that.

[Great Beyond]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

You'd want to set that off some distance away from the event, so that the transmission stayed on a few seconds.

 

I mean, we are talking about serious evil, right?

 

Hmmm, point. Perhaps you could arrange detonation during one of those long shots of the stadium and the skyline of the city. That should be far enough away that the signal keeps sending for a few moments after the blast.

 

Oh - damn, I forgot about the EMP. Sneak in and specialy shield the camera against EMP bursts perhaps?

 

If I thought it would work' date=' I'd just dump it in the San Andreas fault and cause "the big one" to drop half of California into the ocean - with the added bonus that a large percentage of Pacific shipping just came screeching to halt.[/quote']

 

Just make sure you buy up a bunch of desert at really low prices so you can exploit your beach front property on the new coastline.

 

. . . Naw - it's been done before.

[Yansuf]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

While many of these are great ideas for a comic book plot, I must say most of the posters seem to have a VERY exagerated view of the effects of a one megaton bomb.

 

A low altitude airburst has negligible EMP; yes, there is EMP, but the area effected tend to be smaller than the area effected by major blast damge. Only high altitude bursts give EMP over vast areas.

 

Nuking a power plant to increase radioactive contamination is basically a waste of time; the fallout from the ground level bomb detonation FAR exceeds the contribution from the waste stored at the plant. The ground level detonation will cause over a million tons of fallout, a few tons of nuclear waste doesn't really mean much with that.

 

A giant quake on the San Andreas fault will not sink CA, it moves the southern portion northwest. In a few million years southwestern CA will be an island off the coast of Oregon, it will not be below the sea.

 

If I were a supervillian trying to create maximum chaos, my target list would be (not in any particular order):

 

Moscow

Paris

Karachi

New Delhi

Beijing

Mecca

 

Russia and France would definately launch nuclear retaliation, probably without waiting to ensure that they got their targets right! If I could get hold of material from the US to make the bombs, they nuke the US, the US retaliates, massive devastation in Europe, Siberia and North America. Even if I cannot get US material, there is a chance Russia will shoot at the US by reflex. If not, they will blow up somebody (or several somebodies) and create a lot of disorder. Anyway, the fact that nowhere in the US was hit might help convince the Russians that the US was behind it all.

Who the French will attack is unknown, but if it appears to be a terrorist attack they will probably retaliate against Iran or Muslims in general.

 

India and Pakistan will probably retaliate against each other, almost by reflex, without waiting for any investigation of who was really behind it.

 

The attack on Beijing cause the PRC to attack someone, again with the US untouched it probably would believe America did it. After all, their villian list would be the US, Russia, and India. The latter two were attacked, America wasn't. Elementary (even if wrong.)

 

Hitting Mecca will obviously enrage all muslims.

 

The only problem from the villian's point of view is unless Russia can be persuaded it was the US that attacked it, no other potential enemy of America has enough nukes and intercontinental delivery systems to devastate North America. If the PRC could be persuaded to launch everything they have at the US (before the US hits them, because they really do not have a "second strike" capability) they could do a lot of damage, but again, that would require making them think that the US was behind the attack on them. That is why no target in the US were on the list.

[ThothAmon]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

Six one megaton nukes detonated in a precise sequence on the surface of the moon in order to knock it into decaying orbit. Target: Earth.

 

It is rubber science (I hope) but us master villains love to think BIG

[Yansuf]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

Six one megaton nukes detonated in a precise sequence on the surface of the moon in order to knock it into decaying orbit. Target: Earth.

 

It is rubber science (I hope) but us master villains love to think BIG

 

Congradulations! You win the the Big Bounce Rubber Science Award!

 

Changing the orbit of someting as massive as Luna is beyond the capability of Star Trek TOS, let alone 20th century science. (Yes, I know what the year is, but one megaton nukes are not new.)

[megaplayboy]

Re: Plot Seed: Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

 

I remember conceiving a similar plotline years ago(but never running it), using a dozen 100 megaton cobalt-salted thermonuclear devices. Basically, a megavillain/group has planted a dozen super-dirty meganukes around the world and the heroes have to find them first.

 

I do recall reading somewhere that bombs of that magnitude would pretty much utterly destroy about 1500 square km. each.