This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Actually any weapon with significantly more power than usual TNT is always nuclear. It does not matter is it is some magic dragon blood potion or some futuristic technology. If it involves something beyond usual chemical reactions it is nuclear by definition. only difference is that futuristic nukes have no fallout and no radiation. Basically hydrogen bombs are more or less equal tecnology, because they are relatively clean and do not contaminate area. Nonnuclear weapons in movies have only meaning that they are not plutonium or uranium based, but use some cleaner materials. Antimatter is good choice for very clean nuke.
Susan Davis: N2 mines are not a subversion of the trope — they're a straight example.
Pepinson: It's subverted because so much attention is drawn to the fact that this mushroom-cloud-generating superweapon is really not nuclear, honestly we swear it isn't—it's like naming a messiah-type character "Joshua H. Notchrist," then having him go around healing people , walking on water, and having them die in a ridiculous crucifixion metaphor.
Susan Davis: Naming The Messiah "Joshua H. Notchrist" isn't a subversion of The Messiah, it's an example of Steven Ulysses Perhero. Not everything that is subversive is a Subverted Trope — in fact, some tropes are meant to be subversive, at least until they get overused. This trope is all about the series creators taking great pains to explain that the nukes they just set off aren't really nukes... and the N2 mines are pretty much the canonical example.
Red Shoe: I find myself wondering if this trope has some penetration into the west, at least in Sci-Fi — a reliance on Unobtanium powered Phlebotinum-Bombs rather than weapons based on a straighforward extension of the principles used in modern weapons of substantial destruction. Maybe it's just me, but I find it really strange and creepy the way that the Big Bombs in the new Battlestar Galactica actually are called "nukes".
Kendra Kirai: Technically, any sufficiently massive explosive device would cause a mushroom cloud effect. It's just most common with nuclear weapons because of the immense power in a small package. Rarely, if ever, would you find an equivalent amount of, for example, dynamite, or C4 in one place and set to explode at the same moment. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to compact an explosive substance into the size of an N2 mine. Perhaps with some kind of fusion bottle, or whatever they use for the batteries on the Evangelions.
A mushroom cloud is merely a large explosion which has been constricted around the base by the vacuum formed from the compression wave. Smaller versions are visible with conventional explosives in large enough quantities or certain conditions.
BT The P: In the case of Sci Fi, I'd say that people thought that the militaries of the future would use a futuristic superweapon instead of a "mundane" one like a nuke. Galactica's writers just realized that once a technology is created, there's no reason to un-create it, especially when the ones using it are not particularly worried about fallout.
random passer-by: I think that if we start trying to dissect the science in a science fiction series, particularly one as fantastical and mystical as NGE, we get nowhere fast. The plugsuits are woven of condensed fanservice. The Evas run on handwave power.
It isn't that we can't enjoy analyzing the series, but for me it's about the characters and their relationships, not the nuts and bolts of what an S2 engine is and how it works.
To be more serious and address the specific point, yes, if you pile up a few hundred tons of high explosive and set it off, you're likely to see a mushroom-shaped cloud climbing upward above it into the vacuum a few seconds later. The US military actually did things like this in the late 1950s on test ranges in the southwestern US; I think the biggest they ever set off was something around 400 tons of explosives, in some test relating to shelters and equipment resisting the blast. 400 tons of TNT is not even half a kiloton—as nukes go, that's TINY.
I have read that during the Cold War the US developed a 155mm tactical nuclear artillery shell with 100 times that yield, 40 kilotons (which is still pretty small as nukes go, some of the big ones had yields measured in tens of megatons).
I can think of no even remotely scientifically plausible thing the N2 mines could be if they aren't nukes. Chemical explosives release the energy of chemical bonds and must necessarily always be many orders of magnitude less powerful than the big bang boom you can get by diddling with subatomic particles and the forces that hold them together. N2 mines are fantasy every bit as much as the giant robots and the kaiju are. They therefore must work on the principle of handwave power and focused fanservice. QED.
Kendra Kirai: Well, it is set in a fictionalized 2014. There's no reason not to assume that they wouldn't have the technology to create a fusion bottle, for example...magnetically-contained high-energy plasma, just itching to get out and wreak havoc upon unsuspecting atoms. Or perhaps a small amount of antimatter. Neither of those are nuclear weapons, per se.
Susan Davis: A fusion bottle would be a (thermo)nuclear weapon... but that's not the point. The underlying logic behind the Applied Phlebotinum is irrelevant to this trope — what makes this trope is the degree to which the show runners try to sell the audience on the supposed non-nuclear nature of the weapons in question.
Kendra Kirai: Well, in that regard then, it doesn't really fit, since (to my knowledge) they're only ever referred to in the series itself as 'N2 bombs' (or mines). The Non-Nuclear is in the assorted supplementary information that accompanies the vast majority of Humongous Mecha and Mind Screw series
Kendra Kirai: You know, upon examination, almost none of these examples take any great pains to state they're not nuclear weapons, and many of them are even beam weaponry, which is certainly not nuclear weaponry. The Nausicaa Ohmu example doesn't even have a similar effect to a nuclear weapon except in making the area uninhabitable by humans for years. You may as well call the Boston Marathon an example.
Tulling: Out of curiosity, is there a similar taboo against incendiary weaponry?
Seth: To quote evolution "Napalm, lots and lots of Napalm" - Ive never seen any slaking away from using incendiaries but they aren't used very often (Not particularly practical) you can get a cooler effect with conventional explosives in TV and Film. More bang for your buck so to speak, the military only use them when they want to affect a large area for little effort - i cant think of many examples on TV and Film where that is the case.
Nornagest: Ironically, napalm (or gasoline-based incendiaries, which are cheaper and safer) gets used onscreen to represent high explosives all the time. It just looks cooler; incendiaries produce billowing clouds of photogenic smoke and flame, rather than the somewhat anticlimactic flash and nearly invisible shockwave that real high explosives make. For a good example of the latter, look up You Tube footage of the Falklands War; "HMS Sheffield" ought to do it.
Ranchoth: Strictly speaking, I'm not sure the pseudo-nuke weapon in Escaflowne qualifies for this trope—it was pretty clearly not an atomic bomb as we understand it, but the context of the weapon's use and all the characters' reactions to it* were pretty much identical to if someone used an honest-to-god nuke.
- To editorialize a bit, [spoiler: said reactions were a bit amusingly over the top...one of the surviving bad guys even screams accusingly about it the weapon being the "work of the devil." This coming from a guy working for the side that was pretty much trying to destroy the world itself, after the good guys used a single bomb against a strictly military target (a battlefield in the middle of a desert)! ]
Susan Davis: "[T]he context of the weapon's use and all the characters' reactions to it were pretty much identical to if someone used an honest-to-god nuke." Yes, exactly. That's precisely what this trope is.
Ranchoth: Eh? The trope description describes inventing an explicitly non-atomic weapon so as to get away with using a big-ass bomb without invoking all the cultural baggage of using an actual nuke. Escaflowne invents an explicitly non-atomic bigass bomb...so it CAN dredge up the cultural baggage of using an actual nuke. Kind of a subversion, if anything.
Red Shoe: The Nuclear Weapons Taboo is kinda like a culturally-specific version of Never Say "Die": We all know darned right well that it's a nuke, and it behavies just like a nuke, and is exactly as terrible as a nuke. But because they don't actually use the word "Nuke", they don't break the taboo.
10Kan: The times I've seen nukes used in non-anime sci-fi (and bear in mind that I'm not terribly well-read), they've been aboard warships fighting each other in space, and the authors take a moment to point out that they're not all that useful offensively except in a narrow range of circumstances. In one a nuke was defensive, detonated during a chase to create an EMP to blind the pursuer's sensors. In another the crew of the nuke-armed ship had to execute a clever and daring strategy to get the weapon close enough to their opponent for it to be effective. I think the trend now is to say that future belligerents will have developed some gim-crackey point defense systems which render most weapons that one can 'see coming' obsolete.
Krid: The Final Fantasy VI example has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. It doesn't even really have explosions so much as it has attacks that toss water and dirt into the air. Also, the "weapons" mentioned were living beings that smashed things in a very non-nuclear way. I'm going to go ahead and delete that example.
Susan Davis: No, the FFVI example was from the end of the World of Balance, which (among other things) ended with a graphic of the entire planet being covered in momentary explosion-like flashes, looking exactly like the classic image of a nuclear war in progress. Kefka's Wave-Motion Gun on his tower also wound up "burning" affected towns; if the graphics had been up to it, that might have resulted in a nuke-like depiction.
Susan Davis: Removed "This trope is weakening—neither Stargate SG-1 nor the new Battlestar Galactica shy away from mentioning actual nuclear weaponry." because those are Western series, and this is specifically a Japanese trope.
- Debatable. I don't think there's any way that, for example, Star Wars could've got away with having Luke use a nuclear missile to destroy the Death Star. Maybe "you can't mention nukes" and "nuclear weapons are evil" should be separate tropes? I bet there are a few cases of a nuclear version of Technical Pacifist out there too. —Document N
H. Torrance Griffin: What? No mention of El Hazard? I would think the Eye of God counted if Ifurita herself did not.
Citizen: Ifurita is a Person of Mass Destruction. Eye of God is the Death Star. I don't remember either packing nuclear-like weaponry.
Souju: Why oh why is Grave of the Fireflies implied to be about Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki? It's about the firebombing of Tokyo! Seconded! And page edited to remove the reference.
Kenb215: Removed non-example with natter:
- In Western animation, this occurs in the Justice League Unlimited episode "The Doomsday Sanction," in which Project Cadmus deploys a "kryptonite Radiation" bomb against Superman, Doomsday, and an island full of evacuating refugees. The bomb is diverted from its path, and it makes a very large, very not-green mushroom cloud in the ocean. If it were really a "kryptonite radiation" bomb, one would presume that it would only affect Superman, and also that it would, I don't know, be green.
- Actually, the missile WAS a standard nuclear weapon, but it was also tipped with a kryptonite warhead so it would be capable of killing Superman.
- Still, they never actually use the word "nuclear".
- Yeah, they did. About fourteen minutes in.
J'onn J'onzz: I don't believe it, it's a nuclear missile. - Actually, the missile WAS a standard nuclear weapon, but it was also tipped with a kryptonite warhead so it would be capable of killing Superman.
Auraseer: Removed the long, detailed explanation of how a fuel-air explosive works. This isn't just a discussion about big bombs, it's about the trope of using apparent nuclear weapons under another name.
- Also, according to the non-canonical PS 2 game, it's technically an antimatter bomb....even though an antimatter bomb the size of those in the series would actually take out half of Japan when used. They theoretically only need to be about as big as desk to take out a city.
Also, would the Revelation Space verse be an aversion worth mentioning? In one book a colony fleet has nukes for the purpose of carving out the best possible landscape to settle on; and in another, teraton nukes are used simply as flares. —Document N
RA Kthe Undead: According to some questionable research I've done about nuclear weapons in space, they might not even be worth using at all. Because there's no atmosphere, there wouldn't be any shockwave, meaning that the only explosive effects would be a paltry bit of heat radiation and a bit of shrapnel tossed out. You might not even get an electromagnetic pulse effect if you're not near a magnetic field. Nuclear radiation doesn't get attenuated by the atmosphere, though, and it spreads out a lot further.
s5555: Wasn't the missile that they used at the end of Ace Combat Zero an aversion of this trope? They explicitely say that it was nuclear.
Psychotol: Antimatter, reacts with matter by anihilation, energy equalls mass speed of light squared. ... Sorry, but that's nuclear. Also, react matter with antimatter, unless you do ONLY antihydrogen with ONLY hydrogen, it's likely to be highly unbalanceed, the exhaust is likely to be highly radioactive.
I think this trope could stand to be extended; the 'taboo' includes demonising actual nukes to the point that suggesting their use is basically a sign of being unalloyedly evil [as with Metal Gears, which the series is quite clear should not exist at all]. If they come up related to Japan at all, they're probably not going to be shown in an even remotely positive light. You know, as part of that pity-trip poor, wounded Japanese historical revisionists enjoy going on when they're calling Nanking 'a few deaths' in history books.
