Weapons of mass destruction

[debirlfan]

Okay, I've got a terrorist/mad scientist who wants to wipe out the population of a major city circa 1995. I'm wondering if anthrax in the public water supply would work? For various reasons, I don't want to use a bomb - would like something chemical/biological that could be introduced either into the air or water. If anthrax won't work, does anyone have any suggestions?

[SirOtter]

'Wiping out' the population of a major city would be virtually impossible by any means, short of carpet bombing with thermonuclear devices or something else not yet developed, much less available fifteen years ago. I don't know of any cities of much size that only have one water source, especially given several plots to try your scheme during World War II. Water treatment and distribution was generally decentralized in the 1940s for exactly the reason driving your plot. You maybe could take out a large chunk of a few neighborhoods by poisoning a single water source, but not the entire city. Regardless of how virulent your biological agent is, there will be some who are either naturally immune or lucky enough to dodge all the microbial bullets. I would also suspect that you'd have to dump such an incredible amount of whatever into a main reservoir that somebody would notice the dump trucks backing up and dropping their load. Otherwise, your poison would be too dilute to do nearly enough damage to make your villain happy.

Some sort of gas might work, but you'd have to be sure of wind patterns. It would help if your city were in a valley or bowl. Even then, it would be nearly impossible to get the whole city. High-rise buildings would likely be too tall to be affected if your gas is heavier than air, but a lighter than air gas would probably dissipate too quickly to achieve the desired effect.

Anybody else got a better idea?

[debirlfan]

When I say "wipe out", I'm not really talking about killing every man, woman and child - just doing harm to as many people as possible, and causing a major panic. The more I think about it, the prospective attack doesn't need to be limited to a city - I'm now considering the idea of anthrax laced envelops being mailed randomly around the country (Given the problems created by seven envelops sent to specific targets in 2001, a couple hundred envelops sent nationwide could cause some real damage.)

Alternately - I think I recall a case in the last few years with some Russian defector or double agent being exposed to some sort of radioactive isotope? I wonder if that is something that could be "seeded" via the mail?

[Scoody]

Alot depends on what kind of story you want to tell. Does the terrorist launch one attack and threaten another? Does someone discover the plot and there is a race to prevent it? If so then not only do you need to be up on the methods used to attack but also on how it affects the victims, what leads everyone to believe it was anthrax and such.

[debirlfan]

Actually, the Good Guys are going to find out what the Bad Guys are planning, and stop it before it happens. I just want to make sure the Bag guys plot is something that presumably would cause major problems if they did get away with it.

[justAnotherWriter]

I'd go with a Neutron bomb. Not the fantasy kind that kills people and leaves everything else miraculously intact, but the real thing, an ERW (enhanced radiation weapon).

It has a much lower yield than a conventional nuke but dumps a ton of lethal neutron radiation over a very large area. This radition has tremendous penetration and can even get people in bunkers.

Even one of these could wipe out all life in city, depending on the size of the city and the yield of the warhead.

[DrZoidberg]

"Physics for future presidents", is a fantastic lecture series on just these sort of things:

http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/PffP.html

It's a lecture series on physics where the angle is, "What every world leader needs to know". It covers all this. Listen to the lecture on nukes, and feel the calm spread in your body. After this lecture series you'll have more ideas than you could ever hope to use.

...or you could just make something up. Newspapers are remarkably liberal with the truth regarding these sorts of things. I forget the name of it, but a few years ago there was a film released based on a book where a dirty bomb goes off in Washington, levelling the entire city. This is just utter fantasy. Dirty Bombs couldn't even hypothetically explode in this way. This didn't prevent the book from getting picked up and made into a film.

[Kathie Freeman]

About the most ridiculous movie scene I ever saw (don't know if it's the one you are referring to) had the a-bomb on a small boat in a harbor and the techs trying to disarm it. The timer reaches zero minus 5 and someone yells "Run!"
3 men try to scramble up the ladder to the deck. OMG where did they think they were going to hide???

[abctriplets]

Alternately - I think I recall a case in the last few years with some Russian defector or double agent being exposed to some sort of radioactive isotope? I wonder if that is something that could be "seeded" via the mail?

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

It was polonium-210, and appears to have been ingested. This is pretty cool: "Unlike most common radiation sources, polonium-210 emits only alpha particles that do not penetrate even a sheet of paper or the epidermis of human skin, thus being invisible to normal radiation detectors in this case."

[PeterL]

It is almost completely impossible to wipe out a major city, but a large thermonuclear device would be the best bet. Anthrax would be a very poor choice, because it is spread by spores, and a person has to get about 10,000 bacteria in his body for anthrax to have a chance to take hold. Gas attacks are fine for small areas, but a major city would have too many differences in terrain for it to get everywhere. If the good guys stop it, then the bad guys could use anthrax, even though it isn't especially dangerous. Putting it in the water wouldn't be a good idea, but if they're getting caught, then it doesn't matter. Cholera in the water would be more realistic and dangerous.

[DrZoidberg]

If you have access to a cities underground systems and you have a large space where you can mess about at your leisure, there's really no limit to how big nuclear bomb a bunch of well organised terrorists can build. You cold even have a go at a hydrogen bomb, even if that would require some serious scientific know-how and facilities. Most problems with nukes comes from rapid deployment.

[debirlfan]

Actually, the atom bomb thing won't work for me, as there is a sci-fi angle to this in that the bad guys have access to an "immortality serum" that they intend to give/sell to certain individuals to save them - so I need something that will poison/sicken people rather than vaporize them. The cholera thing might work - or at least it might sound scary enough for the heroes to get worried. Thanks, folks.

[SouthernFriedJulie]

You could throw in a genetically engineered super-virus. I know that there were experiments involving the effort to mix ebola, aids and other experiments just as bad. All were aimed at super fast infection to death...and the worst part? Aerosol. I can't remember the name of the experiments but the special on this aired on History or Disovery several years back.

[PGK]

If you're working with sci-fi and "immortality serums" you're basically unleashing the beast and allowing it to run freely. In other words, if you expect readers to be "cool" with an "immortality serum" you can expect them to be cool with pretty much anything your imagination can create: a super-virus, super-chemical, super-whatever. How important is it for you that the instrument of death, destruction, and chaos is based on reality? If there's an immortality serum there could also be a chaos/disease/death serum. That's the beauty of sci-fi: your imagination is the limit and you can create a new reality that has nothing to do with what we live in.

[DrZoidberg]

If you're trying to create a virus as a biological weapon, you want a virus that kills people quite a bit down the road. H5N1 acted in that fashion (when it did). A virus that kills quickly, like Ebola, dies before it barely clears the gate. This is the reason why a virus like HIV is so prolific, even though it isn't even an Aerosol.

When you're trying to kill humans, with their clever and paranoid brains, you have to convince them that they won't be in mortal danger if they leave their homes and go about their lives as usual, preferably without washing their hands obsessively. If a virus like Marburg hits the streets of a modern city, nobody will go outside if they aren't wearing full body suits. They will disinfect their whole bodies every five minutes. A virus like that will most likely not get anywhere.

If AIDS caused people to drop to the ground in broad day-light hemorrhaging from every orifice, everybody would wear condoms. If you got HIV every time you had sex with somebody infected, everybody would wear condoms. If they did the virus would most likely die or be well contained. But they don't, so HIV is allowed to spread at an alarming rate.

If you want to threaten a city you'd probably want a virus that is extremely contagious, who's danger is questionable. Maybe something like Human Papillomavirus, where the virus itself is harmless but can give rise to cancer, way down the road. And then once people realise the danger of it, it'll be too late. You could have a lone researcher nobody listens to? That's a classic

[debirlfan]

After doing some digging and some reading about the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak, I think I'll go with anthrax distributed via an aerosol method. The Russians apparently considered it a viable weapon, so it should be good enough for my terrorists. Thanks again.

[RobinGBrown]

Alternately - I think I recall a case in the last few years with some Russian defector or double agent being exposed to some sort of radioactive isotope? I wonder if that is something that could be "seeded" via the mail?

If it's the one from London a few years ago, then he ate highly radioactive sushi. If I recall correctly quite a few others were also poisoned as the radioactive material was delivered via a spray device.

Radiation poisoning is not an option for mass destruction, you'd need a lot of material and have exactly the same problems as using poison.

[eurodan49]

In the ‘70s and ‘80s the Soviets developed a large number of “suitcase bombs”…. Linear Implosion type weapons with a maximum yield of only two kiloton. In 1997, Russian National Security Advisor Alexander Lebed (who made public claims about lost "suitcase nukes" following the dissolution of the Soviet Union), said: “I'm saying that more than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of 250 are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I don't know their location. I don't know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they've been sold or stolen, I don't know.” Not long after the interview, General Lebed died in a helicoper accident (conveniently some said, as he was running against Putin and was ahead in the polls).

In 1988 an improved strain of the Ebola was obtained by a two-stage technology developed at the Moscow-based State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT). It could be aerosol dispersed. Transmission no longer by body fluids but through inhalation of the airborne virus. The adenoviral strain’s incubation time had been reduced to forty hours. Even if you manage to quarantine the area of dispersal, you won’t be able to do so with a whole city or country.
The new strain was immune to the vesicular stomatitis vaccine in stock. Research and development of an antivirus could take months and in excess of 2 million will die in this period.