Bomb question

edgyllama said:

I am thinking about a bomb that cam level a Boston-sized city but I wouldn't want to do it with an atomic weapon, for plot reasons. Is there something out there or do I have to make something up? (which would be fine since I may not explain what happened to for a long time in my WIP).

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Umm...yes. Couldn't you level downtown Boston with three million tons of c12? Or just let the adhesive fail on the roof of the Big Dig? And Brazil has antimatter bombs weighing 3 ounces that could do the job, but they are too polite to do it.

Well...I'd make it up or why not have an asteroid do it? Your villain could have some friendly aliens nudge an asteroid into Boston...or a volcano or an earth quake or a tidal wave or a hurricane?

Go for the antimatter! Go for the antimatter!

A gaseous sewer bomb would do the trick...

edgyllama - I'm going to port this thread to the Story Research forum. You may find more answers there.

Is it necessary to be one bomb? If you look at (US and/or most other large military advanced nations) military aircraft bombing they often go for a 'carpet bomb' concept where the pepper the ground with a bunch of small bombs. That would keep long term environmental issues to a minimum (yanno, asteroids and antimatter can be messy) but would also destroy a good percentage of the city.

The latest issue of Scientific American has great stuff about the effects of a nuclear explosion. To produce a big enough blast you would need the equivalent of ten megatons of TNT. That would be noticed. I think your only viable non-nuclear options are in the realm of sci-fi.

antimatter bombs that are not just fiction?

They are real. The November Scientific American ("Roller Coaster" article) had a blurb about a small amount of antimatter already being produced, then introduced to matter, then annihilating each other that in a larger context would be the equivalent of producing matter "elsewhere." This could be extrapolated in larger quantities to the size explosion you need for your story.

edgyllama said:

Well, I'm going to use antimatter. I have no idea if they are real. I don't think I'll have to explain what exploded in my WIP, I'll just keep the idea in the back of my head.

Edit: No they are not real but the government is researching them. Here is article about them:

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

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Meerkat said:

They are real. The November Scientific American ("Roller Coaster" article) had a blurb about a small amount of antimatter already being produced, then introduced to matter, then annihilating each other that in a larger context would be the equivalent of producing matter "elsewhere." This could be extrapolated in larger quantities to the size explosion you need for your story.

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Since in the comic world of Feynman diagrams antimatter is just matter going back in time...a very small time machine could easily blow up Boston.

Antimatter sounds like overkill. Great for obliterating continents in the literature, sure, but... it's incredibly hard and expensive to make. You'd only need a couple of pounds of it to match the biggest nukes ever developed by man, but science is struggling to produce more than a couple of atoms of the stuff so far.

Nukes really are the best for these kinda jobs.

I'd really suggest doing a bit of google-research before writing an antimatter bomb, because they have a long proud history in sci fi, so even if you know nothing about them, other people might.

Now, for conventional weapons... maybe look into thermobaric bombs, like the American MOAB, Mother Of All Bombs, or the more recent FOAB, Father Of All Bombs. These aren't really terrorist weapons, if that's what you're after, they need to be dropped from an aircraft, but they pack a hell of a punch. Flattern and burn everything within a couple hundred yards. Still not, however, a proper city-buster.

Here's a recent story on making antimatter (specifically a positron beam), but there's not much clue as to "how much" is being generated. I'm sure it's still a VERY small amount, in relation to how much would be needed to cause even a small explosion:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071024090816.htm

Divert an asteroid from it's orbit ... BOOM.

Something about 50 meters in diameter did this: a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

The blast and thermal energy released by the impact would certainly have been lethal to living creatures within a wide area. All life within a radius of three to four kilometers would have been killed immediately. The impact produced a fireball hot enough to cause severe flash burns at a range of up to 10 km (7 miles). A shock wave moving out at 2,000 km/h (1,200 mph) leveled everything within a radius of 14-22 km (8.5-13.5 miles), dissipating to hurricane-force winds that persisted to a radius of 40 km (25 miles).

Aiming it is the problem.

now all you need is a really big magnet

Anthrax

Don Allen said:

A gaseous sewer bomb would do the trick...

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Funny! I wonder what would cause it?

Huh, thinking about Boston, I remember quite a few city blocks were wiped out by molasses weren't they?

The tank holding them was built shoddily, and it burst covering a whole neighborhood, leaving death and destruction along the way.

Wouldn't happen now, too many "failsafes" in construction sites because of the 'accident'.

Suggestions? Destabilizing the aquifers below, subterrainean charges, deep sonic waves, tsunami, hurricane combined with Nor-easter...

Use an LNG tanker or two in the harbor. Fracture the tanks, wait for the gas to mix with air (a few seconds) then detenate it. The fireball and shock wave would level most of the city. It's a bit far out, but feasible. Fuel-air explosives (FAE) were big time with the Russians for some time.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "leveled".

Do you mean to leave nothing but charred rubble, with no survivors and absolutely nothing left standing? Then you would probably be talking about something exotic like a nuke or the forementioned anti-matter bomb.

But if you simply need the city destroyed, with outlaying structures still standing but unsound, damaged beyond repair with massive overall casualties, then you might be able to get away with something like several strategically placed air-fuel bombs like MOABs or Daisy-Cutters. Since their main components are common explosive gases (and assuming I know what I'm talking about) they technically within the means of clandestine construction, if one of course has lots and lots of $ and the know-how.

However if you're talking about Boston specifically, then all you have to do is have your antagonists figure out a way to ignite bullsh*t, and half the state will be gone.

The LNG tanker would work. So would a freighter loaded with certain fertilizers--Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb on a really big scale.

The last actually happened once, in Texas City, TX in 1947. Ships are bigger now, so the blast could be bigger. It wouldn't "destroy" Boston, but it could do a number on the harbor district--the Texas City blast was equivalent to between 2 and 4 kilotons according to the DOD (see Wikipedia).

So if your nasties were to take a modern cargo ship and load it right, then blow it up before the authorities noticed it wasn't carrying what it was supposed to be carrying...

It would take a lot of doing, but it's doable, I suppose.

Read about the Halifax explosion. During the WW1, a ammunitions ship exploded in Halifax harbour and leveled a good portion of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Except for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in WW2, it is still the largest explosion in recorded history.

It may give you some insight into how ordinary people dealt with it and moreover what it felt like.