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"Tactical nuke ready. Turn the key."
"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
"NUKE THEM...if you wish."
I will provide funding and research to develop tactical and strategic weapons covering a full range of needs so my choices are not limited to "hand to hand combat with swords" and "blow up the planet".
When faced with a Monster Of The Week, military commanders show an unhealthy urge to move right up to the (current) Final Option when the monster can't be killed with bullets. They never stop to consider using something else in their arsenal that's a bit more powerful than a rifle, but won't cause as much collateral damage as a low-yield nuclear bomb. It's all or nothing. If hand-held guns didn't do the trick, forget artillery, bunker-busters, fuel-air explosives, chemical or biological agents, just get the nukes.
More level-headed characters will usually try to make this point, only to be told that there's "no time" to study the monster, we have to take it out now (and every other living thing inside a radius of five kilometers) before it gets bigger/destroys more things.
From there, it becomes a race to see if the scientists can find the monster's Achilles Heel or get the Forgotten Superweapon back online before the Army gets its approval to start lobbing warheads. Of course, if the Army wins the race, it's likely that the nukes will either do nothing, or make things much, much worse, making the heroes the last hope.
Anime doesn't use this much, due to the Nuclear Weapons Taboo.
If a nuke is used to solve or avert a more natural disaster, see Deus Ex Nukina.
See also: Five Rounds Rapid, Immune To Bullets, The Evil Army. Very common in Science Is Bad stories and usually involves a General Ripper (in fact, the Trope Namer for General Ripper made this his signature). A popular way of ruining someones day with Death From Above. Contrast with Mnogo Nukes, where mutually assured destruction is very possible.
Examples:
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- Amusing case in Neon Genesis Evangelion: The army do try almost everything in their arsenal before resorting to thinly-disguised, and when they fail decide giant human shaped robots are the best bet.
- The Macross series are an exception to the Nuclear Weapons Taboo, although its reaction weaponry isn't nuclear per se — it's an annihilation weapon, that is, an antimatter charge:
- Macross Zero: The propelling force of the final episode's bizarre ending is that, just after the hero has used The Power Of Love to subdue the monster controlled by his girlfriend, the navy launches nukes and makes everything worse. Though, admittedly, every other ship with smaller weapons was wiped out ten minutes ago.
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Not only are the devices extremely effective in almost every time they're deployed, but the Zentradi are astounded that humans have the technology to make "Reaction Weapons".
- Macross 7: Lampshade hung in that, for all that it's implied that nuclear weapons are a weapon of last resort (Earth Command authorizing their use is seen as a big thing), every ship in the fleet seems to have unlimited stores of them. At one point, Basara even exclaims "Reaction weapons! Reaction Weapons! Any time something goes wrong, is that the only solution you have?!"
- Macross 7 was probably given an unlimited supply of them because they did absolutely jack shit to the Protodeviln command ship.
- Macross Frontier shows that even chronically redshirted NUNS pilots could be pretty effective when armed with the stuff. Of course, arming everyone with such weapons means that the NUNS on board the Frontier is reaching the end of its rope, as the Vajra have managed to adapt to everything else (and, eventually, adapt to reaction warheads too...)
- The Robotech remix also features judicious use of nuclear weapons and their 'reaction' upgrades, here called 'reflex weapons'.
- In Naruto, this turns out to be Pain's ultimate attack. He then uses it to NUKE KONOHA.
- Also we have Deidara's suicidal explosion in Chapter 362.
- Pain's goal was to use the power of the tailed beasts to create a Kinjutsu capable of wiping out an entire nation; we see it in action in an imagined scenario, and the resulting explosion is very akin to that of an actual nuclear bomb.
- Happens in Getter Robo Go, after Shin Getter Robo goes berserk they various governments make several attempts to try and stop it, eventually resorting to a nuclear strike. The machine ends up grabbing the missile and combining with it
- Bleach had Soi Fon, of all people pulling this as Bankai. Naturally, she didn't like its nature.
- Put into effect in Gundam Seed's final battle, where the Nuclear Weapons Taboo is lifted. Fortunately, the two heroes are there with their Improbable Aiming Skills.
Comic Books
Fan Fic
- The Cultists of Dagon use underwater nukes against attacking NEG forces in Aeon Natum Engel. Radical measures were proposed in both NEG Military High Command and the Migou Council, but calmer heads prevailed.
- The nBSG Cylons try to nuke the Stiletto in The Open Door, but the ship tanks all of them without needing its shields.
- Most 1950s B-grade SF movies. Whether it works or not varies between films.
- When asked how to deal with the Xenomorph threat in Aliens, Ripley's first response is the famous line "I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." Of course, Ripley turns out to have been right in this case, and anyway there wasn't anyone left alive in the colony.
- Subverted in Independence Day. The army tries conventional bullet weapons, missiles and (it is implied) any other standard weapon, but they are all repelled by the aliens' shields. Ultimately, after great tribulation over the matter, the painful decision of using nukes is taken. Only one strike is made (annihilating a large city) before it is realized even they are ineffective.
- Extended in Evolution, but it uses napalm. The army gets napalm to destroy a lifeform, just after the protagonist discovers a smaller sample expands by many times after being touched by fire. They tell the army, they attack anyway and the monster becomes about a million times bigger.
- Subverted in Mars Attacks!: Nothing Earth has done thus far can so much as scratch the Martians. The General Ripper has spent the movie insisting on using nuclear weapons, and the President, depressed at how nothing is working, finally gives the go-ahead. The Martian response to the nukes headed their way is... a small flying nozzle which intercepts the missiles, sucks them up, and converts it into something like helium, which the Martians inhale and get squeaky voices from. It could quite possibly be helium. When you fuse hydrogen (as in a thermonuclear bomb), you get helium although nothing was said about it specifically in the film.
- Subverted too in the 1953 version of The War Of The Worlds. The military throws everything against the Martians before reluctantly turning to a nuke as a last resort. Notably the civilian scientist hero does not, unlike his counterpart in Independence Day, object to the use of nukes. The nuke fails to do anything to the Martians.
- Unlike the original H.G. Wells novel, in which the Martians are vulnerable to Earthly weapons, but theirs are so much more powerful that resistance is futile once the element of surprise is lost.
- WOTW and Independence Day are additionally linked by the fact that the bombers which deliver the devices (against a very similar threat and with a similarly dismal outcome) are both flying wing designs built and flown by Northrop. That's right - the Air Force Flying Wing in George Pal's film was not a studio prop or special effect but an actual prototype bomber. The one aircraft is in a way the grand-daddy of the other, just as with the films they star in.
- In Godzilla (1985), not only did nuking him not work, it made him stronger. Nukes against Godzilla. Smart thinking, guys. That's like using a flamethrower against the Human Torch.
- Alien versus Predator: Requiem. The "Predalien" has already managed to overrun the entire town with its more classically-styled offspring. The military solution, after the recon unit sent in is quickly butchered? Nuke the town. It gets worse: they specifically tell the survivors to congregate in the center of the town for an airlift, so as to keep the Aliens from spreading out. Bastards.
- The Abyss. While suffering from paranoia, Coffey decides to destroy the aliens by sending down an armed nuclear warhead.
- From Robo Cop: 'Get them before they get you... Nukem
 !'
- Return Of The Living Dead. They nuke the zombies (and all the main characters in the process), but, of course, that just causes the zombification juice to re-enter the atmosphere and create more zombies. Good going, dumbasses.
- In Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, the remaining human faction worships a fully functional cobalt bomb.
- In Monsters Vs Aliens, the robot probe is found to be indestructible and the President wants to simply launch all the nuclear missiles on him when General Monger stops him.
- Honor Harrington has nukes replaced as the standard ship to ship weapon by laser heads, bomb-pumped X-ray lasers (a real concept from SDI). Warships still carry "old-fashioned nukes", but they're rarely used for anything other than demolition.
- The Mobile Infantry of Starship Troopers carry over a dozen tactical mini-nukes in each suit of their Powered Armor, which they use in raids to destroy large buildings.
- Subverted in the book and the 1971 film version of The Andromeda Strain. The titular extraterrestrial organism (a single-celled, quasi-crystalline life form) mutates as it's exposed to ionizing radiation - at a rather sedate rate under atmospheric UV exposure, extremely rapidly with more powerful sources. Of course, the secure biohazard laboratory where this bug is being studied is equipped with a thermonuclear device for "terminal sterilization" in case of contamination, and the lab becomes contaminated when the organism mutates to a form that degrades organic polymers, thus compromising the synthetic rubber gaskets and hatch seals throughout the lab. Failsafe Failure ensues.
- {Dune}}: The Great Convention states - "Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration." (All other planets will gang up on the offending planet and blast it into a glowing coal.) The idea is to save them in case humanity is attacked by hostile aliens. At least until Leto II's death and the end of the Great Convention, after which atomics are thrown around more freely. MUCH more freely.
- In the original novel Paul Atreides uses them to clear a way for his forces and quite rightly claims when accused that he "used atomics against a natural feature of the desert; it was in my way and I was in a hurry to get to you". Of course Arrakis was the one source of the only substance that permitted faster-than-light travel, so nobody DARED nuke it until things had changed, many thousand years later.
- A nasty weapon called the Stone Burner pushes the edge of this treaty. Details are sketchy in canon but it appears to be an atomic-powered plasma torch designed to cut its way into underground fortifications (the weapon is emplaced rather than dropped or fired). Its complications are "J-rays", which indiscriminately blind all within their range (but do not kill), and the fact that if over-fuelled, it will cut its way into the planet's core (the mantle appears to be what's actually meant) with presumably planet-terminating results. One is used within the canon; the use of another is described as the cause of a character's blindness while on military service.
- Morgan in The Dresden Files. He slew an ancient Native American nightmare creature by luring it to an atomic bomb testing site!
- H. Beam Piper's Uller Uprising. For an unusual version, getting up to the point where they had a functioning nuclear weapon was the plot for 90% of the book, since weapons technology had marched on quite significantly by that point - but the protagonists didn't have access to any of those fancy "destroy everything within a thousand miles" miniature-sun-bombs.
Live Action TV
- Farscape does this twice, once in the first season in order to destroy Scorpius' Gammack Base (Though it isn't technically a nuke, per say, the yield is similar), and again in the last season, where John creates a makeshift Nuke to use as leverage in his Xanatos Gambit.
- Saturday Night Live parodied this in the (are you ready?) "Attack of the Masturbating Zombies" sketch: a professor suggests dropping an atomic bomb on the town square, only to be told, "Professor, that's your solution for everything."
- In the pilot of MacGyver, the army plans to use a nuclear warhead to stop a chemical leak. In the end, Mac fixes it with chocolate.
- The Stargate series loves the bomb, and uses it with increasing frequency as the series progresses. One was used in the movie, a few were used in Stargate SG-1, and nukes seem to be the primary weapon of Stargate Atlantis. Their starships use nukes as standard armament.
- Rampant nukings are sort of justified in the Stargate series', because everything they nuke is light-years away from anything they care about, so they don't cause any collateral damage.
- Not just nukes, naquadah bombs will wipe out an entire planet in one shot if they're big enough.
- So will naquadah-enhanced nukes.
- This comes back to bite them when the Ori trick them into setting one off in order to siphon the energy and bootstrap construction of a warship-sized supergate.
- Which they eventually figured out how to destroy with nukes. If the humans want something nuked, by God they will find a way to nuke it.
- Captain John "Nuke 'em" Sheridan from Babylon 5—so nicknamed by actor Bruce Boxleitner, who portrayed him. His distinct uses of nuclear weaponry:
- Nuking the Black Star, the Minbari flagship, in the Back Story. His ship was damaged, so he mined an asteroid field, sent a distress call to lure the Minbari (they don't leave survivors), and waited.
- Nuking the City of the Shadows on Z'ha'dum with a remote-controlled White Star.
- Nuking the Vorlons and Shadows at Coriana 6; again, pre-seeded mines. "Morning, gentlemen. This is your wake-up call."
- Nuking the Thirdspace gate—this time literally flying in his spacesuit inside, and hand-placing a nuke.
- "Nuke 'em" is clearly Sheridan's favorite tactic, followed closely by "Give me ramming speed!". But it works, so no one seems to mind.
- The new Battlestar Galactica gleefully hurls nukes around with wild abandon. In the mini-series alone the Twelve Colonies are hit by thousands of nukes: Helo reports seeing six mushroom clouds just from the one area his Raptor has landed in on Caprica in the space of about an hour. Galactica itself withstands a direct hit from a nuclear missile, although it sustains heavy damage and more than 80 casualties. Nukes are also later used to destroy a Cylon basestar and Gaius Baltar appropriates one, allegedly for his research but this is later used to blow up at least three of the refugee ships and kill more than 3,000 civilians. The high-point for the use of nukes is when Pegasus withstands no less than three nuclear hits at pointblank range and shrugs them off to inflict grievous damage on the attacking Cylon basestars with its railguns. Nukes are later used to destroy the Cylon Resurrection Hub and in the stand-off between Galactica and the rebel basestar. In a moment of possible high irony, the Galactica finally reaches Earth to find the planet irradiated by a nuclear war.
- The Outer Limits (new version) likes to nuke them. In "The Light Brigade" the titular human warship is hit by two nukes. In "Trial by Fire" the US president tries to nuke the aliens who have splashed down in Earth's oceans.
Tabletop RPG
- Used intermittently in Warhammer 40000. Actual nuclear weapons are not prominent, being relegated to use by garrison forces for the most part. When a cosmic horror rears it's head the three most favoured options are saturation orbital bombardment, Exterminatus or deploying the Grey Knights.
- Weapons on the same or greater scale as nuclear weapons include: plasma torpedoes (200 meter inter-ship ordinance), engineered viruses (including the Worldkiller Virus and Vortex weapons.
- In Shadowrun, Ares Macrotechnology used a tactical nuke in an attempt to saturate Chicago's astral plane with toxicity and kill the hordes of bug spirits that ravaged the city. Fortunately the bug spirits' own energy-shield trapped the physical and metaphysical blast inside the bugs' nest, preventing its full impact from reducing Chicago to a radioactive ruin.
- You gotta give props to FASA: it takes nerve to nuke your game company's own hometown.
- Their own headquarters, as a matter of fact.
- In the old World Of Darkness, this was the Technocracy's answer to the Ravnos Antediluvian rising. The timeline is a little unclear, but it seems that after awakening in India, Ravnos first sparred with two elder eastern vampires for several days, then in the endphase of that fight got highlighted by a Kill Sat of the Technocracy focusing the sunlight onto his position and then had an atomic bomb made with Applied Phlebotinum dropped on him point-blank. The last one seems to have killed him for good. Maybe.
- GURPS should probably be given credit for specifying how much damage various types of nukes do, most games are willing to settle for "you die".
- They also specify how damage gets reduced by distance from the center of the blast, and how much radiation damage the aftereffects cause. They also let you use nuke as warhead for pretty much anything if your bullet is large enough, up to and including nuclear grenade launchers and antimatter ammo for normal firearms, so one would need nothing bigger than a (still rather large) pistol to Nuke Em. There Is No Kill Like Overkill indeed.
- Averted in GDW's cold war tactical games like Harpoon and Air Strike which focused on convential weapons. For a nuclear variant the game designers recommended dousing the game in lighter fluid and setting it on fire.
Video Games
- Raccoon City is nuked in the Resident Evil series after most of the populace has been zombified. Whether or not actual nukes were used, however, is the subject of much debate among fans.
- In Crysis, after pulling off the island, the Navy decides to nuke the aliens, deflecting Dr. Rosenthal warnings that they absorb energy with comments along the lines of "There's no time to study them." To nobody's surprise, the aliens absorb the blast and get stronger. Just as predictably, it's all your problem from there. And then played straight by having the player use a nuclear grenade launcher on the alien space ship.
- In World In Conflict, this happens twice in the campaign. First a tactical nuke is called in to take out an overwhelming Soviet force headed for a "hold at all costs" level objective. Then, at the end of the campaign, you are racing against time to push the Russians out of Seattle before their Chinese reinforcements arrive and the president is forced to obliterate the city. And you can call in as many as you want in multiplayer.
- That last sentence is an understatement. In "World In Conflict" many players just play to call in nukes because the special effect is so cool. In fact, if you're advancing into a town or something, you often have to repeatedly tell your team, "Don't nuke the town [forest, bridge, etc], my troops are up there!"
- In Command And Conquer: Tiberium Wars, Kane's discovery of Killian Qatar's apparent betrayal and alliance with GDI results in a slightly angry response. His subsequent orders are to, well....
- In Red Alert 3, Soviet General Krukov orders the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal to be used against the Empire of the Rising Sun and the Allies when the former begins their offensive on Leningrad. This was after he and Premier Cherdenko went back in time to kill Einstein, preventing him from developing the Allies' technological superiority. Technology like nuclear weapons. Oops.
- The iconic Black Mesa Research Facility is destroyed by a nuclear blast at the end of the Half Life expansion, Opposing Force. Curiously you spend a large chunk of the game trying to avert this, but a few minutes after succeeding you see the G-Man reactivating the bomb from afar. Obviously you survive, as do a number of other characters who go on to appear in Half-Life 2.
- Starcraft features nukes for, you guessed it, the Terrans. Using two nukes in the same area will kill EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING within the blast radius, since each removes at least half of the target's hit points (or five hundred HP, whichever is higher).
- Tom Clancy's End War, while not a nuke, gives the Russians a fuel-air bomb as the WMD when they're in danger of losing, though it's roughly equal in power to the European Kill Sat and American mini-Colony Drop.
- In Fallout 3 not only can you carry around mini-nukes that seem to cause localised nuclear detonations, but you can opt to nuke the peaceful city of Megaton in exchange for a few hundred caps and a room in Tenpenny Tower.
- Nukes are plentiful, usable, and devastating in Total Annihilation and its Spiritual Sequel Supreme Commander, though in the latter, only the United Earth Federation technically uses a nuclear weapon-the Aeon use a "quantum warhead" and the Cybrans an "electron flux warhead".
- The UEF Ambassador strategic bomber is armed with a low-yield tactical nuke.
- Metroid Prime 3: The Leviathan Seed on Skytown is protected by an energy shield, and unlike the last level the generators are out of reach. So what solution does the local supercomputer come up with? Assemble some parts they happen to have lying around the place, and drop a nuke on it. It's called a 'Theronian Bomb', but is also referred to as a nuclear weapon, so presumably it's pretty much the same thing with slightly different ingredients.
- In DEFCON your job is to pretty much nuke the entire world (with the exception of your own continent). While several other weapons beside nukes exist, they are mostly used to shoot down nuclear missiles. Or shoot down airplanes carrying nuclear missiles. Or sink submarines that can sneak up on you and fire nuclear missiles. And all is shown in the style of the final scene from War Games.
- Every game in the main Civilization series features the development of nuclear weapons (or "Planet Busters" in Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri) in the late game, which are by far the most devastating offensive units available even after it becomes possible to build countermeasures. However, using them makes all AI players declare war on you automatically, releases vast amounts of pollution, and in some games advances the Global Warming timer by a significant amount. Too bad the AI doesn't have nearly the same compunctions about deploying them.
- In MUGEN: The A-Bomb. It nukes your characters and completely vaporises anything that isn't as overpowered. Good thing there's always Chuck Norris to destroy it...
- Global Effect (an early 90's PC game) would let you nuke enemy cities at will. Made the whole screen fade into white for a few moments. It was a guaranteed way to punch an ozone hole in the sky.
- In the Touhou game Subterranean Animism, Utsuho's attacks include miniature nuclear explosions and miniature STARS.
- The Carronade or Hex Cannon in Breath Of Fire IV is depicted as a particularly (and literally) Nightmare Fuel-filled magical thermonuclear weapon equivalent. *
The real Nightmare Fuel is in the power source and in the ammo; the power source is a princess who is converted into an artificial Endless by Yuna so that she can be perpetually tortured, whilst the ammo consists of people with a close connection to the target being literally tortured to the point of a mental breakdown and then subjected to human sacrifice. It's the pain, rage, and suffering that ends up being the "warhead".
- Depicted originally as a plot-point in a town that was Hex Nuked, including literal Hex Decontamination Teams. Even with this, it is stated will take many years for the hexed city to recover—which has had to be evacuated of residents.
- Depicted most tragically in Fou-lu's storyline. *
Peasant girl meets dragon-god. Peasant girl falls in love with dragon-god. Peasant girl is taken prisoner by empire dragon-god founded 600 years ago, tortured horribly, and ultimately used as Tactical Thermonuclear Peasant in attempt to kill dragon-god. Dragon-god survives (barely) and goes completely bugfuck nuts when he realises who was used as the ammo. Suffice it to say that it does not end well for the Evil Empire.
- In Modern Warfare 2 you get this as an unlockable killstreak. It kills everybody on the map and wins the game for you...if you have 25 kills.
- In other words, it's a mercy kill for the poor clods you hopelessly outmatch, ending the game in a fiery spectacle rather than letting the humiliation continue.
Web Comics
Western Animation
- The Iron Giant has a sequence where paranoid intelligence agent Kent Mansley prompts a nuclear strike on the Giant, rashly ordering it before they have the chance to move it away from the city.
- Megas XLR is apparently armed with nuclear weapons. In the "Viva Las Megas" episode, Coop proposes using them to blast out of an underground bunker, but is waved off by Jamie and Kiva. He laments "What's the point of havin' nukes if I can't use em?"
- Humanity tries this against the machines in Animatrix: The Second Renaissance. It doesn't help.
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