Top 10 Most Terrifying Weapons In History
#10: Plague Bombs
For people in the Middle Ages, the Black Death was as mysterious as it was terrifying. It swept through towns and cities like an invisible hand, leaving millions dead. Imagine the horror when in 1347, during the Siege of Kaffa in Crimea, warriors of the Mongol Golden Horde catapulted the corpses of plague victims from their own ranks over the walls. According to one 14th century account, the attack filled the city with “mountains of dead”. It was one of the earliest instances of biological warfare, and may have introduced the plague into Europe. Centuries later, during World War II, the Japanese would also weaponize the disease - dropping ceramic pots that contained plague-carrying fleas in China.
#9: The Gatling Gun
Top 10 Firearms That Changed History
Ironically, American inventor Richard Gatling created the forerunner of the modern machine gun to reduce wartime casualties. He theorized the Gatling gun would “supersede the necessity of large armies”, diminishing “exposure to battle”. Designed in 1861, it was a crank-operated, multi-barrel weapon that fired 200 rounds per minute - which increased to 3,000 once Gatling hooked it up to an electric motor. It was an unprecedented rate of fire, a whirlwind of bullets that awed, terrified, and mowed down combatants. Its success paved the way for the recoil-operated Maxim gun, and ever lighter, more portable machine guns, that soon became standard weapons of war.
#8: Land Mines
Top 3 Facts About Toy Story Land
Landmines have been called “uniquely savage in the history of modern conventional warfare”. Designed to blow apart a leg or riddle bodies with metal fragments, landmines mostly maim and kill civilians during peacetime. The Song Dynasty used them against invading Mongols in the thirteenth century, but they were first used on a wide scale against tanks in World War I, with anti-personnel mines soon following. Suddenly, even the ground was suspect, and every step could be one’s last. Their use in subsequent wars has left over 110 million mines remaining in the ground today.
#7: Mustard Gas
On July 12th, 1917, waves of brownish-yellow gas rolled over the Allied troops at Ypres, Belgium. It was the first use of mustard gas on the battlefield. Soldiers at Ypres had already faced chlorine gas, as well as phosgene, which was colorless and more lethal; but mustard gas loomed larger in the public mind, perhaps due to its appearance and gruesome effects. Rising up like ghosts from exploded artillery shells, the corrosive clouds blistered skin, blinded victims, and caused internal and external bleeding. Its use was one of the first steps down the dark road of modern chemical warfare - which saw the development of much deadlier chemical agents in the interwar years.
#6: Agent Orange
Top 10 Franchise-Changing Free Agent Signings
The use of deadly chemicals in armed conflicts didn’t stop with “the war to end all wars” . . . or even World War II. Originally known as “Operation Hades”, the US’ “Operation Ranch Hand” aimed to annihilate forest cover and food crops used by the Vietcong in the Vietnam War. “Hades” was a better name: the clouds of oily white mist that drifted down from the skies left the land dead and barren. The countryside was doused in 20 million gallons of defoliants and herbicides, most notoriously Agent Orange - which left the toxic chemical dioxin lingering in soil and water sources. It was later linked to cancer and crippling birth defects.
#5: Killer Drones
10 Killer Cults You Should Know About
Imagine a constant buzz overhead as hunter-killer drones search your street for targets. It sounds like dystopian science-fiction, but under the Obama administration, the presence of aerial assassins over some villages in Northwest Pakistan became commonplace. Their use has been controversial, due to the number of civilian casualties, as well as “double-tap” strikes that have allegedly targeted rescuers. Others have fired on funerals, and in December 2013, a wedding convoy in Yemen. Nonetheless, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles like the US Predator and Reaper drones have become a quintessential part of modern warfare - ushering in a new era of depersonalized “remote war”, and edging us closer toward ever more automated weapons.
#4: V-Weapons
The 10 Most Difficult Weapons to Master
In the early hours of June 13th, 1944, Londoners woke to an ominous buzz and a trail of fire in the sky. It was the first strike in a relentless barrage of the Nazis’ V1 “vengeance weapons” - the first guided cruise missiles. In September, as countermeasures slowed the onslaught, the Nazis rolled out the V2: liquid-fuelled ballistic rockets that were almost impossible to intercept as they plummeted from the edge of space at supersonic speed. The Nazis had eliminated the barrier of distance - and created the technology behind modern Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. From now on, death could fall without warning from clear skies, anywhere, and at any time.
#3: Aerial Bombs
English cities had suffered aerial bombardment before the Second World War. During nighttime raids in World War I, the throb of engines overhead preceded the emergence of vast airships from the dark, and indiscriminate blasts that reduced homes to rubble. Aerial bombs had first been used by the Austrian Empire against Venice in 1849, dropped from unmanned balloons, and from heavier-than-air aircraft in the Italo-Turkish and Balkan Wars. Their use soon became routine and ever more devastating. They were famously described by writer Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the British-American Bombing of Dresden, as like “the ear-splitting crashes” of giants’ heels. They left the city looking “like the moon” rather than Earth.
#2: Greek Fire
Top 10 Ancient Greek Myths That Turned Out To Be True
As Arab soldiers watched helplessly from their vessels during their siege of Constantinople in the late seventh century, Byzantine ships spewing fire bore down on their decks. The fire was unearthly - accompanied by “thunder”, and burning even on water. Fire has long been a weapon of war, but Greek Fire was something new: an inextinguishable and devastating weapon that set ships alight, burnt soldiers alive, and has been credited for the long survival of the Byzantine Empire. Its composition, said to have been revealed by an angel, is now lost. It may have been petroleum based, similar to napalm - another “sticky fire” that wreaked appalling horrors on its victims.
#1: The Atomic Bomb
Top 20 Craziest Military Weapons That Actually EXIST
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These were the immortal words of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the awful power of his creation. The quote was all too apt. When Hiroshima was bombed on the morning of August 6, 1945, residents saw a bright flash of light before the blast ripped off their skin, boiled their organs and melted their bones. The bombing of Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, killed an estimated 129,000 to 226,000 people. For the first time, we suddenly had the power to destroy the world. In the ensuing years, nuclear weapons would become hundreds of times more powerful, fuelling Cold War fears.
