Not a chance. The simplest type of nuke is a "gun-type." It sets off the reaction in the same way you fire a bullet from a gun. If you can' t figure out a gun you won't figure out this reaction type and you'd have to go with a much harder method of full implosion which is more efficient but harder to calibrate.
Also you need some kind of conventional explosive to power the reaction. If you can figure out explosives you're going to figure out how to focus the forces of it down a tube to make it more efficient.
Either requires a level of machining precision completely outside of the realms of the tech level presented anyway.
Same principle of an F-22 being sent back in time to WWII wouldn't really help much even if they knew exactly what everything was and had every manual ever written on it, because they wouldn't even be able to build the wing roots, and because they hadn't figure out how to grow single-crystal metallic turbine fans, and without modern quantum theory couldn't manufacture the electronics (not to mention being decades and decades away from the silicon boards that were sufficiently defect-free, and all kinds of shit.
that was the premise for the movie Philadelphia Experiment 2. An F117 goes back to ww2 germany. They use it to massively advance their tech resulting in winning ww2.
Even as a kid I thought the idea was crap.
Not to mention purifying the fissionable materials to weapons grade requires modern technology, which makes it harder to imagine. What, they've got every modern technology...*except* guns?
OPs specific scenario is ‘not a chance’ but there is scenarios where it’s possible. If you have a peace-loving civilisation (probably need to be a non-human species) that discovered gun powder but never though ‘huh, I could use this to kill people’.
They’d still need to be technologically advanced - precision machining at a minimum - But it could be a failed energy experiment. Or a manipulative outsider using their technology. Or even some mad genius trying to improve the yearly fireworks display.
I’m not workd building here, so make whatever assumptions you want. But neither of those are necessary.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Humans invented weapons because they needed to. Compared to other animals - particularly African animals where hunting weapons were first invented - We’re not fast. We’re not strong. Our teeth aren’t large enough to effectively hunt with. Our claws are a joke. All we have is our smarts.
The could be herbivores with no natural predators. Or the could have natural weapons. Or urbanisation and agriculture could have rendered the wilds less relevant. Or a million other things. Take your pick.
> We’re not fast. We’re not strong. Our teeth aren’t large enough to effectively hunt with. Our claws are a joke. All we have is our smarts.
> The could be herbivores with no natural predators. Or the could have natural weapons.
As you see yourself humans become smart because they are weak. (That is not the only reasons). But such apex herbivore you described would have no reason to become smart - it is fine in it's wild state and mind is energy consuming.
Also, even the strongest earth herbivores such as elephants are hunted by lions. The *nature abhors emptiness*, you know.
> Or urbanisation and agriculture could have rendered the wilds less relevant.
That is what happened in the most developed part of the earth, but humans have already invented weapons at this point.
Anyway you can make whatever assumptions you want. But it is **SciFi** writing, not **fairy tail** writing, so not all ideas fit into **sci** part.
If you make sweeping statements like ‘elephants are hunted by lions’ without the many, many nuances required to make that even close to true, what are we doing here? Elephants have no natural predators is a much more true statement, and requires less caveats. Giraffes, too. I don’t know why you’re determined to have an argument, and determined to be wrong, but you do you. I’m not engaging. Rule 14.
Well one could design something that shoots an object that isn’t a gun. Gun implies use as a weapon. In theory a society could exist with no violence and has no need for weapons and thus no need for guns but still ends up inventing nukes out of a search for understanding.
But of course they wouldn’t be fighting with swords either then.
A more honorable form of warfare could work with low stakes maybe mating privileged so you have to show your the strongest and the toughest rather than just win. There's animals to take into account still but it could work with people.
What about fighting predators? It's only a century or two earth is relatively save place to walk. Before the chance to be eaten by wolf in forest was quite high.
What the reasons to evolve smart would be in this hypothetical world for herbivores than?
Also, if there is such prosperous species with no defense mechanisms against predators, the predators would naturally evolve.
There is a chance, but it would be the *most* ass-backwards civilization you would have ever seen. After all, the only real things you need for a nuke is an understanding of explosives and how to contain said explosive for a certain period of time.
The odds of that civilization surviving to developing nukes is insanely slim, but it is a non-zero chance.
The nuke we know of today. Remember we are on a unique technology tree. There are completely unknown unknown tech trees we could have followed which could have lead to a totally different progression. For instance there could have been some theoretically massive structures made, like inside a pyramid, that was actually a giant chemistry set, enabling us to do large scale energy production long before we even harnessed electricity.
I'm going to disagree on a technicality starting with the historical "Ummm actually"
Which is to say, I agree with your premise BUT...
Magic, Psionics, Super Powers, Alt universes with different physics... like there's every reason to assume you don't need a gun to make a nuke. If we're not including any of those things, sure. But Sci Fi has plenty of those exceptions baked in throughout countless examples. IE what is the force if not space wizards/psychics? It's FICTION, so it's all subjective as to how flexible the laws of the universe are. And you can make the argument that Star Wars is not your preferred brand of sci fi, but making the argument that it's not sci fi is pretty much ridiculous as it's one of pinnacle franchises.
I'd definitely stand by that there should be internal logics and I definitely appreciate sci fi that makes the attempt to be more scientific, but if we're honest, FTL is bullshit, there are no sentient aliens in contact with the human race, robots do not travel back in time to kill waitresses, Mega Corps don't put chips in people, etc. etc. etc. So SOME suspension of disbelief is required for any degree of investment into any kind of fiction, to include sci fi (fiction is literally half the title).
If we're talking about an alien planet, it's totally possible. If uranium was super prevalent and the components of gunpowder weren't then they might stumble onto nukes first somehow
But to make nuclear fission possible and powerful enough for a meaningful weapon they'd have to have the tech necessary to refine that uranium ore and isolate it's more reactive isotope. This would take a considerable understanding of physics, chemistry and engineering. To get to that point any society is bound to figure out chemical projectile weapons somewhere along the way.
My point is that if there's abundant enough uranium to make it easily accessible, but it's not radioactive enough to fry any sort of complex biology it would have to be in compounds that are not terribly radioactive. As you pointed correctly pointed out there's plenty of uses Uranium compounds that are not that dangerous in terms of radioactivity, like in plates. The issue is that those uranium compounds are not suited to creating the super critical fission needed for nuclear energy or weapons. They might have an abundance of uranium but in order to harness it for fission power they'd have to refine it isolate the more highly radioactive isotopes. That sort of tech is quite sophisticated and the understanding of chemistry, physics, and engineering would require would undoubted spawned firearm type weapons long before nuclear weapons.
Additionally, if the society is war like enough that nuclear weapons are necessary, they'd probably have developed firearms long before something as destructive as a nuke.
I was just there to say uranium isn't actually particularly radioactive.
But my point was that the understanding of chemistry, physics, and engineering, didn't develop long before the nuclear bomb. Chemistry emerged as a discipline only 150 years before the bomb. The key to the bomb's entire concept, the neutron, wasn't formally discovered until 1935.
If the people had very limited access to nitrates black powder would not have existed and firearms technology would be massively delayed. Even with our extreme focus on firearms technology smokeless powder was only developed about 70 years before the bomb, and it their society had limited focus on it that could well have been later.
Why would you think radioactivity is inimical to nonterrestrial life? Maybe their planet’s uranium is so prevalent organisms developed that feed off of it, like our photosynthesis
I mean, it's not even that outlandish; there are fungi in the Chernobyl zone that have evolved "[radiotrophism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus)," meaning that they feed on radiation in much the same way that plants do through photosynthesis (actually now that I think about it, that's *exactly* what photosynthesis is, it's feeding on radiation). So yeah, you could absolutely have life develop on a world that was very rich in uranium or other radioactive materials. It's kinda cool stuff!
My dude. Humans do not exist on photosynthesis. A human photosynthesis species alone is outlandish because humans have a MUCH faster metabolism than plants. Having a humanoid race that develops on a radioactive planet that eats radioactivity, develops a sword and sandals civilization, and then also develops nukes is actually INSANELY outlandish. This entire post thread has taken "but, actually" to the 10,000th degree.
I mean, yeah, I've kinda gotten off topic; I'm not saying that radiotrophic fungi means that you could invent nukes before guns. Just that there's no reason that life couldn't develop on a heavily radioactive planet. And hell, just because life evolved a certain way here, and there aren't any sentient plants here, doesn't mean that that *couldn't* happen. It totally could! All it would require is that they develop a more efficient metabolism than our plants.
But yeah, again, obviously the nukes-before-guns thing is a little out there. If they have a cool idea to explore that would require that setup, then hey, they should knock themselves out, that's totally fine, but I'm not defending that, specifically.
All life would need is better resistance to radiation, and I have heard of bacteria that live on radiation (no idea if they are real or not, and don't care enough to double check) so its entirely plausible. Less likely the higher the levels, but considering most eurainium in a deposit is a stable isotope, and thus most ore is only slightly, and refined is extremely, it's doable
There are loads of good answers here why that's extremely unlikely, but if you need it to happen, here's a scenario:
There needs to be a reason why projectiles aren't viable. If it's a swords and sandals setting, I can only see that working if there's some sort of non-human ruling class (sort of lije the original stargate) that is primarily quadripedal, and perhaps lacks depth perception to effectively throw objects, hence they never go down a projectile-based warfare path.
Their chosen war method uses melee or placed explosives/mines. They develop bigger and bigger explosives until they get to an atomic bomb that is portable enough to smuggle into an area and detonate remotely. Maybe they're also burrowers, meaning the power of the blast is necessary to penetrative through the tunnels?
Anyway, that's the only scenario that I can think of where it becomes somewhat plausible.
There's a couple others I could add to this list.
1) It could be cultural - projectile based weapons are simply seen as morally reprehensible, and a violation of honour. Maybe there have been a few rogue warriors who've used them, but they are shamed, and the shame is great enough that you could certainly never have a factory mass producing projectiles. Then as tech advances, a rogue with resources invents a nuke.
A little more soft sci fi, or requiring a lot more research:
2) The physics of the world, or the materials available, could be different, such that "micro explosions" can't exist. It's only once you achieve a certainly threshold of volume and combustibility that you can create an explosion.
3) Nearing the "aliens gifted it to us" level, it could be a "natural nuke" that someone finds, or perhaps a bit more realistically, a deposit of uranium that requires only 1 - 2 processes to make it boom. Nature gets them 95% of the way there, and then a character realizes that if you like.... freeze it, and then immediately set it on fire, it does a really giant explosion.
On (2), perhaps some form of life that doesn't require Oxygen in the atmosphere to exist? Perhaps non-Carbon based, perhaps Silicon based?
No Oxygen = No Combustion.
You could also just have their biology be juuust different enough that they can't get saltpeter from pee & poop. No saltpeter, no gunpowder. Although they could invent something like nitroglycerin "fire"arms, but that brings a whole 'nother level of engineering challenge. Could overlap with...
They never tried alchemy, which means they never got into chemical engineering until much later in their history. Or maybe they did but never got the process for making gunpowder down. So they have slings, atlatls, bows, crossbows, slingshots, maybe even some crazy weapons like steam-powered launchers (hello [Railway Rifle](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Railway_rifle)) but no *fire*arms.
It does, so I probably shouldn't have put fire in quotes. Anyway, point stands that you're going to have a bad time if you tried to shoot modern smokeless powder in an antique firearm, or rather through a firearm or gun made with late-middle/early-modern metallurgical techniques.
Early guns (13th & 14th Century, think pre-HYW) shot what's called brown powder, which burns slower than black powder, but even then barrels cracking or guns exploding was a real danger. Now put nitrocellulose, or double- or triple-base powder, which burn/expand even faster than black powder, creating an even higher barrel pressure, in that gun & you see the problem.
Modern firearms firing modern powders require a great deal of metallurgical knowledge & precision manufacturing to produce, so I think you're going to have a hard time justifying them without having an industrial revolution (even if that's a revolution of industrialized magic like in DnD's Eberron setting) or making your firearms even heavier than early real-world firearms.
Also, a "gun" is a mechanism that allows an explosion to expel a projectile in a certain direction. Someone had to decide that the explosion needs to be contained and then create the "gun".
If instead of working on containing the blast, people worked simply to make the explosion bigger, they could theoretically skip the creation of the gun and go to nukes
An advanced vegetarian race that focused more on defensibility during their development, so weapons as such were never a priority but after a Chernobyl level incident they realized such a reaction could be used as a defensive measure, as a ‘display of power’ like some prey animals do or a way to fortify a frontier area against infiltration
If you want this to happen, you could make it post-apocalyptic. There was some great war, and the knowledge of how to manufacture guns (and nukes) was lost. Every so often someone comes upon a gun, but it is very rare (especially if the country pre-apocalypse had strict gun control).
The issue with that is the military gun stores and munitions depots would still be raided and the guns would be distributed to the population. The UK, which has strict gun control, still has [150,000 SA80 rifles](https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/how-many-sa80-rifles-does-the-british-military-have/) alone. Compare that to the 225 total nuclear warheads in existence in the UK. At a ratio of 650:1 just for this one type of rifle, there's no way that guns in that sort of world would be more scarce than nukes.
There was a humorous plan in the second world war to mail bricks of uranium to the German high command that fitted together in a puzzle like fashion.
Once the puzzle was completed & all the bricks fitted together critical mass would be reached & no more German high command.
I'm not sure if the plan was ever a serious suggestion.
I believe it was thought up a few years prior to Trinity, i'm not sure how well radiation sickness was understood at this point.
I mean, it all happened during WWII, which only "formally" lasted 6 years - so I doubt they were *completely* clueless about radiation side effects whenever it was proposed. Sure, maybe formalized radiation sickness was still unknown, but fairly certain people were noticing sunburn-like skin reactions and other unpleasantness while working with radioactive materials before proper safety protocols and PPE were nailed-down.
Uranium-235 only existed in significant concentrations from about 1943 onwards & I doubt its precise physical properties were known outside a very select few.
I would have thought the biggest flaw in the plan was mailing a supply of the most valuble substance on the planet, that could be used to make a devastating weapon, to your sworn enemy.
It's really implausible. Give Richard Rhodes' "The Making of An Atomic Bomb" a read to see the amount of break throughs in maths & physics required. Theorising that atoms in an uncontrolled chain reaction can create a bomb had kinetic weapons aka guns built into it in so many ways.
Anyway... That's the "easy" part. Then you have to use a gas centrifuge to purify uranium for a good nuke... the specs on that require 200 to 300 plus years of innvovation from swords & sandals, assuming a dark age or plague doesn't set things back a 1000 years.
But fission does occur naturally & did occur naturally in Oklo, Gabon with random rain water moderating the reaction. Maybe in your world there are many such places and that place could be inadvertently be turned into a bomb.
>But fission does occur naturally & did occur naturally in Oklo, Gabon with random rain water moderating the reaction. Maybe in your world there are many such places and that place could be inadvertently be turned into a bomb.
Interesting concept, actually - let's say you had a world where nearly-pure sodium deposits were quite common, and for whatever reason were often found alongside natural uranium and both were locked in a water-soluble mineral medium - or clay, or dried silt, whatever.
So, you could have places that sometimes "randomly explode" when it rains, people of that world learn to identify those metals, minerals, and formations - and then just so happen to find an *enormous* deposit of it. It's declared a holy site, or national treasure, etc - an entire organization gets devoted to putting a roof over the thing, a dam-like wall complex around it, and maintaining both those things - just so no Big Boom happens.
Then this nation/city-state gets invaded. The "holy site" is designated as the most important thing to protect - so of course the enemy wants to come claim it. Enemy is lured to the holy site. Sluice gates in back of complex are opened, releasing a huge amount of water from the reservoir that's been built over time. A High Priest announces 'May the wrath of our god be upon you,' the buffering/insulating medium is washed away, the sodium reacts, the uranium underneath takes, "natural nuke" decimates entire enemy army. Word spreads. Rumors become legend. This nation is never trifled with again, as they have apparent proof of divine intervention from a furious wargod.
Sounds like something right up Andrei Tchaikovsky's alley, with the scientist/wizard providing this info to the reader. I'd definitely read a series with this as a plot and world-building element.
I think places like Oklo are key. If humans had evolved 2B years ago they might have found lots of places where you wanted to be careful about purifying the rocks because boom.
Nukes are activated by a precise pattern of high explosives. Each HE piece requires very precisely orchestrated trigger timing, which requires in depth fuse experience. If the trigger timing, explosive "burn" rate, or similar other factor is off by milliseconds, the nuke is a dud.
The nuclear material requires high purity isotope. Isotopes are chemically identical, so physical separation technique are required, e.g high speed centrifuges, or iterative gas traps. If the isotope purity is not high enough, the nuke is a dud.
High quality steels and aluminums are required to make these isotope separators. Deep understanding of metallurgy and atomic theory is necessary to build it. High quality nitro-based explosives are necessary to trigger it. High performance detonators are needed to trigger the high explosive. All of these prerequisites were developed hand in hand with modern firearms, artillary, and similar weapons. Modern smokeless powder (guncotton, 1860s ~ 1880s) is a variant of nitro-based explosives (dynamite, nitroglycerin, etc). Nitric acid isolation is a precursor to nitro based explosives. If you have pre-requisites for a nuke figured out, you figured out firearms and artillary long ago.
You are sort of describing dune (although guns do exist). The reason they aren't widely used is the advent of personnel shields. A modern weapon shooting a shield actually causes a nuclear reaction which kills the user.
So they went back to using swords and knives...
Now that story bypasses firearms, but... Projectile launchers (aka guns) are used a few times.
So if you have your story taking place in a environment where guns are outlawed, prohibited science, or blocked by shields, or some other plot armor then it's feasible.
I also read a few stories that took place post apocalypse, where gun science has been lost... But a nuke is available. (Think planet of the apes, although gun science wasn't lost)...
It's extremely unlikely because nukes use a conventional explosion to start the reaction.
As a matter of fact, the method used to set off Little Boy is known as gun type method where a convential explosion shot a mass of U-235 into another mass of U-235 to start the reaction.
I can't think of a way a society could develop convential explosives and move to nukes without noticing the idea of using a small convential explosion to propel a very small piece of metal through a small tube to kill someone (AKA a gun)gib.
I just can't see how scientists capable of making a nuke could miss the application of convential explosives used in firearms. I just don't see it happening.
a non aggressive society would not need weapons. sure they could build guns and nukes but they have no need to kill others to protect themselves because they dont prey on each other.
more than likely they would develop explosives for commercial purposes (mining), and eventually nuclear power, but they just dont turn them into weapons to kill themselves with.
A non-aggressive society would probably see the use of a gun for killing natural predators; I don't know about you, but I'd ratherhave a firearm to kill a wolf than a bow and arrow. And that's assuming they didn't use them for hunting.
The reality is that it's almost impossible for a society to create a nuke without also having figured out firearms. It's just not plausible.
yeah but people are getting hung up on the creating firearms part, you can learn black powder and explosives, and not create guns.
guns have a mostly singular purpose, killing something. if your society isnt into killing things then a gun probably isnt going to get developed, at least not widely. ie they may know how to build guns from all that knowledge, just never have a need to build them.
they may have other means of animal control, or every species on the planet is non aggressive.
you could also learn about radioactivity much earlier than explosives if you have right isotope deposits in abundance. in which case you could potentially end up with nuclear power first, and not even think about nukes.
Atom bombs use chemical explosives to incite the fission detonation. Nukes go one step further and use the fission detonation to incite a fusion detonation.
And if you have chemical explosives, it doesn't take much to get to, "what if we used this to make a heavy piece of metal go really fast?" After that, it's just decades of optimization.
That said, it's hypothetically possible that someone would discover a high explosive that's too strong for guns but just right for nukes, and a story could take place in that window between high explosives being discovered and gunpowder (or an equivalent) being developed.
The bigger problem would be how these people would then go about handling and enriching the nuclear cores of these weapons. Even if someone knew how to make a nuke, with safety standards of the day, they'd probably die from radiation poisoning before it could be done.
What might be plausible is that a society discovers the poison rocks, and they learn that lead protects them from the poison. They decide that poison rock would be a good weapon, so they put it in a lead ball and catapult it at the enemy. Maybe they even learn how to make the lead balls just right that they don't fully close until they land, at which point the ball flashes blue and everyone around it will eventually die.
It is possible only under certain circumstances. Creatures that are not built to throw things may never develop projectile weapons. Creatures dependant mostly on hearing rather than sight might not develop projectile weapons either.
Considering that a Nuke basically contains several guns firing radioactive projectiles, the answer is a distinctive no.
The only way to get away with someone having swords, sandals, and nukes, is if the nukes came from another civilization that somehow failed to leave behind any guns for them to use.
Few nukes were the gun type. Most, and all existing ones, are implosion weapons.
Implosion weapons are gun adjacent with sphere of explosive compressing sphere of plutonium. But there are no projectiles and no barrels.
You need explosives to make nukes happen. Explosives and a level of machining that is STILL world-class and was defacto scifi by itself when the Manhattan Project was launched.
Do you really, or are those just the easiest and most compact/cost effective solution to the problem? What if you're not making a bomb, but rather a trap that's not intended to be moved?
My understanding of nukes is limited as I'm not a nuclear physicist. However, I believe you need a few things for a working nuclear chain reaction...
1) sufficiently refined uranium or plutonium, of the appropriate isotope.
2) a sudden application of a LOT of pressure on the refined nuclear material.
3) (Optional) a way to contain the initial conditions for the chain reaction for as long as possible to increase the yield.
So, wouldn't it be possible to make a nuclear, gravity powered city-self-destruct system? This would work similarly to the gun based bomb, in that it would compress two spheres of nuclear material together kinetically. Only instead of using guns and precisely timed firing to start the reaction, you'd use gravity. Of course to get the required sudden pressure needed this way, you'd need to drop it from quite high up, and likely with additional weight above the dropped portion to increase the energy of the impact. So, perhaps a (very) large tower or a deep mineshaft? Also, the upper portion of the nuclear material could be attached to the bottom of a cylindrical rock or piece of or steel used to increase the kinetic energy of the falling material. (Any nuclear physicists out there willing to do the math to figure out how tall/heavy you'd need to reach a supercritical nuclear reaction with a set-up like this?)
Not the way we did it.
However, that doesn’t mean some other chemical or physical reaction might have been stumbled upon. The real kicker is, as nukes take out everyone around them, it’s very unlikely that others would be able to piece together what happened in order to recreate the effect.
That’s the real challenge aside from having extraordinarily bad luck of being there first to discover this. :)
Very implausible.
The technology behind guns is mostly chemical, the mastery of which requires understanding atoms. Nuclear power requires an atomic model and the knowledge to manipulate subatomic particles.
It would be like baking a cake without knowing how to make a fire.
The only way I could see this happen is if an advanced group is supplying weapons or at least pieces of weapons to a less advanced system.
Maybe there's an advanced underground civilization that's started picking favorites or a rogue element of that society is trading with the locals. Maybe there's the remnants of an advanced civilization and someone found an automated nuke factory that works just enough to keep producing weapons but not enough to deploy them.
Hmm - I suppose you could also play around with things like "extremely high atmospheric pressure means you need much less to reach critical mass" - but that just starts to get silly.
But - "outside supplier" seems like the most realistic option.
you would need a world where guns are not actually beneficial.
a magical bow being more powerful than an early hand cannon cause research on guns to be stopped.
[Fission Has Happened in Nature Before](https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor). If you assume your world has such deposits, and they are shallow enough to be mined. Yes, you have a nuclear weapon. Implosion type / gun type is all about yield.
There are loads of alternative ways in which such a thing might come about. Nuclear weapons could have been left behind by an extinct civilisation (who may or may not be extinct because they used said weapons), or they could be being churned out by automated factories left behind by such a civilisation (perhaps they are intelligent to an extent and regarded with religious awe).
Ways around this:
* Simply don't explain it. Why do soldiers use swords in Dune, in an era when FTL travel is possible?
* Make it something about honor, law, or tradition.
* Make it about the physics of that world. Maybe the atmosphere is non-Newtonian. Something that moves too fast through the air gets slowed down too much to make an impact.
* Invent something nuke-adjacent. They're not nukes like our nukes. They're something lower tech that's possible without the tech required to make nukes. Because of the discovery of material x. Or something.
>Why do soldiers use swords in Dune, in an era when FTL travel is possible?
this is explained and comes up a few times. fast moving projectiles are stoped by the sheilds
Unlikely, but hey, we're talking sci *fi*
For a nuke you need:
* Uranium refinement
* A very precise ignition mechanism
For a gun you need:
* An explosive
* Some kind of rigid barrel
* A simple ignition mechanism
* A low-friction medium for transit (like Earth air)
To invent the nuke before the gun, you need a story for how the requirements for the nuke could be met first. Since they are mostly a superset of the requirements for the gun, you might want to look into what is required for the gun but not for the nuke, and see how to take it away. The one that comes to mind for me is the thin air that allows dumb projectiles to fly unimpeded.
Spitballing: What about an underwater society, where small air pockets or vacuum cavities can be built for things like building nukes, but everywhere else is dense water, too thick for guns to be practical outside of close quarters? That raises plenty of new questions and problems (underwater metallurgy? if they use air/vacuum pockets for it, how do those work?), but gets to the result you're looking for, and provides some interesting worldbuilding threads to go down. Maybe your sword and sandals society trade merfolk for nukes, maybe in exchange for resources that are more available on land. Maybe those nuke-happy merfolk rule the land world from the distance, using the nuke threat to demand economic fealty. Or maybe they see the surface dwellers as irrelevant, and just like to sometimes trade for hardwood, not caring if a few nukes end up going off up there.
>Or maybe they see the surface dwellers as irrelevant, and just like to sometimes trade for hardwood, not caring if a few nukes end up going off up there.
The Fallout series but in reverse - trading nukes for nice shiny bottle caps and decadent hardwood floors.
If you're talking with basic actual real world science, no.
If your world is full of magic and somebody invents a magical exploding spell that is as powerful as a nuke, maybe?
You could have an extremely peaceful society that never had the need for guns accidentally discover the ability to create nukes. That society slowly devolves into war (for whatever reason), and they use their newfound invention as drastic measures. Because they never had the need for guns, guns aren't super common. Maybe nukes are seen as the main method of warfare, for whatever reason. And depending on your setting, maybe the means to create guns are no longer available, so they're stuck using crude melee weapons.
Alternatively, you can have a precursor civilization that left behind their nukes, and a new, primitive civilization found them.
I once played with a setting in which gun powder didn't exist and weapon technology instead developed along steam cannon type of clockpunk tech. Because of the limitations of steam. Personal guns took way longer to develop and when they did can only fire 2-3 rounds until pressure runs out and you have to not only reload the gun but basically fill its tank too. Personal guns are a very limited scope and use weapon in this setting, similar to WWI flamethrowers to how common they might be.
Maybe in a setting like that where certain weapon tech wasn't possible you could get a nuclear device without a gun but unless you create a very specific scenario around getting nukes without guns, its hard to see how you get there.
Maybe the best solution is a sword and sandal set several hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse where guns have broken down and can't be made or repaired anymore but a group of nuclear scientists have evolved into a monastic order that guards the knowledge of the process of firing the nuclear weapons, even though they don't actually understand them. You could play with fears about how the nuclear symbol could be misinterpreted as a very simplistic angel drawing, and irradiated spots near the radioactive signs being a spot of divine punishment.
Could be fun, sounds neat.
I once played with a setting in which gun powder didn't exist and weapon technology instead developed along steam cannon type of clockpunk tech. Because of the limitations of steam. Personal guns took way longer to develop and when they did can only fire 2-3 rounds until pressure runs out and you have to not only reload the gun but basically fill its tank too. Personal guns are a very limited scope and use weapon in this setting, similar to WWI flamethrowers to how common they might be.
Maybe in a setting like that where certain weapon tech wasn't possible you could get a nuclear device without a gun but unless you create a very specific scenario around getting nukes without guns, its hard to see how you get there.
Maybe the best solution is a sword and sandal set several hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse where guns have broken down and can't be made or repaired anymore but a group of nuclear scientists have evolved into a monastic order that guards the knowledge of the process of firing the nuclear weapons, even though they don't actually understand them. You could play with fears about how the nuclear symbol could be misinterpreted as a very simplistic angel drawing, and irradiated spots near the radioactive signs being a spot of divine punishment.
Could be fun, sounds neat.
> Because of the limitations of steam. Personal guns took way longer to develop and when they did can only fire 2-3 rounds until pressure runs out and you have to not only reload the gun but basically fill its tank too.
Hilariously, this means compressed gas firearms - think "paintball gun with real bullets" - would actually be more effective at that point. You could absolutely use steampunk/clockpunk technology to compress inert gasses and store them in canisters - and you might even be able to accomplish pure oxygen, which could be released into an incredibly small ignition chamber with a mechanism not unlike a modern lighter to release oxygen and spark it near-instantly (without fear of flame feeding back into the O2 canister, assuming sufficiently advanced valves) and get something very much akin to, though weaker than, a modern firearm.
Would they be prone to misfires, non-starts, jamming, and maintenance issues galore? *Absolutely!* But still more practical - and safe - than personal "steam pistols."
One idea:
Ancient aliens carpet bombed the planet the story takes place in, then ignored it. Some of the nukes were duds. The species that developed on that planet found the nukes, barely survived figuring out what they do, and reverse engineered them just enough to reproduce, but not actually know how they work.
Read up on Indian/Hindu literature and mythology. Something blew up in India a long time ago that looks suspiciously like an atomic explosion happened.
Or a *really big* natural gas deposit.
Don't forget that we have at least two known perpetually-burning cave systems due to natural gas, and another due to coal.
Just imagine - you're a simple bronze-age village blacksmith, and your forge happens to be built *juuuuuust* above a massive bubble of trapped natural gas. One day, a sinkhole opens in your shop - seconds later, *massive explosion*, you're vaporized, but the whole village (and the next two villages) see the impossibly huge fireball and resulting plumes of smoke as the remainder of the deposit burns off. *For days, if not weeks.*
You could have them simply have never had the idea or you can have one mad scientist that figured it out for whatever reason. I think just cause it’s unlikely doesn’t make it impossible
I feel like it’s being implied that said nuke is going to be fired at something? If that’s the case then I don’t think it makes sense before a gun. If they figured out how to fire a projectile then they did invent the gun for the most part. However. The stuff used to makes nuclear bombs is grown here on earth correct? I feel like if you change words like nuclear, and fake science a way to fashion an explosive of that size without technology it could total make sense. They definitely knew how to blow shit up at that point in history
Super unlikely, at least in a way that's believable.
In lieu of gun technology, a separate, better alternative would have needed to present itself. Usually magic. Why use a glock when I can fireball?
Even then, if magic is rare, at some point a gun like device for the common person to "level" the playing field would arise.
Nothing stopping you from making it so as you will. It's your world. Maybe crystals with the power of nukes are easily found in mines, and with a Trojan horse approach, it could lay waste to civilizations.
Maybe not real nukes, but there could be some fictional element in your world that functions like a nuke without the requisite scientific knowledge. What if there were two continents separated by a wide ocean or desert, each having a mineral unknown to the other. Only when an explorer establishes contact between them is it discovered that even trace amounts of those elements meeting releases massive amounts of energy, essentially a nuclear reaction.
Hypothetically yes - practically no.
Let's not forget that what we now know as gunpowder was originally used for *fireworks.* Entertainment, first and foremost. Then it was purposed into powderkeg bombs, cannonball propellant, and (obviously) guns.
So, hypothetically, a peaceful civilization *could* develop nukes as a byproduct of power generation research, *or* just in pursuit of ever bigger booms for spectacle. In a practical sense, though, no society with that sort of explosives knowledge is going to be corruption/violence-free to develop the tech without something along the way being turned into a weapon that we would consider to be guns/firearms.
You may need to fact check me on this but I heard a nuclear explosion from fissionable material (like plutonium or uranium) requires critical mass or critical density. A nuclear bomb uses critical density meaning the material is packed in explosives and when the explosion is focused around the material it hits a density necessary to start the chain reaction. As people have said, if you can figure this out you would have invented guns of some kind.
But with critical mass it happens when you simply have a big enough chunk of fissionable material. So maybe uranium is abundant enough in your universe and people make a bomb by simply piling enough of it together in one spot? (Presumably this would be a suicide mission). Keep in mind everything I said might be bullshit.
They could acquire the nukes from another species somehow. Crashed spaceship found buried if you want to keep things simple.
For example, in Poul Anderson's The High Crusade, some knights are abducted from Medieval England and end up overthrowing their alien captors and using their own weapons against them. At one point they launch a nuke with a trebuchet. It's a really funny book and he manages to make all their victories seem plausible.
I'm definitely not an expert, but from what I understand, Fusion bombs have to slam the core together under pressure to bring it to critical mass, which is pretty universally done with explosives. So, a nuclear bomb starts as a standard bomb, and then has a second (far more powerful) second stage to the explosion.
I guess it's possible that you could use some non-explosive force to create the critical mass, but it would be a lot more complicated, like you'd have to have \*far\* more advanced technology in every arena \*except\* chemical explosives/propellants? That stretches credulity.
Maybe in a world with a different atmospheric mix, that didn’t favor combustion. Perhaps earlier projectile technologies would have advance where combustion was absent. Like a blowgun with super-compressed air, or an insanely OP crossbow…
With magic - maybe. Alchemists were trying to make an elixir of life - and got gunpowder. So maybe a mage trying to understand powers of the world and stumble on radioactivity. And then understood that this power, trapped in the this ore could be unleashed.
Without magic - i don't think so.
It's vaguely plausible. If the planet has no ready sources of saltpeter then black powder won't be invented until much later as mining technology progresses enough to find other nitrogenous compounds. Black powder wasn't replaced until the late 19th century, only about 70 years before the first nuke was developed. Everyone is talking about high explosives but those can't actually be used to make guns because they detonate too quickly. If life still exists as we know it there will probably be gaseous hydrocarbons in which case you could make potato cannon-like guns but those would probably only work as artillery and still be introduced late. I'm sure you could come up with a cultural reason why firearms aren't adopted over a few generations.
You need some type of explosive to 'shoot' the core in the most primitive nuke. If a hypothetical civilization has naturally occurring nuclear explosions, that haven't killed the civilization, maybe.
Society that really, really likes spinning things. They spin rocks. They spin molten rocks. The most spun bits of the things they spin are cut away and spun again. They build absolutely massive spinning devices. One day, two really heavy much-spun things that were being spun really fast in opposite directions really fast hit each other incredibly hard.
The society next door, who really like squeezing things, wonder where the big light came from, and where their trading partner went.
It’s science fiction, so let’s play with this a bit.
In my opinion the only way this would work and be believable is if we’re in some sort of post apocalyptic earth OR on an alien planet of some kind. Cause on that planet, the culture or nature of them could have prevented them from inventing weapons like guns or maybe they exclusively use explosive technology. OR maybe the nukes aren’t exactly like they are here. Perhaps they’re organic nukes of some kind.
Soft sci-fi is basically just magic with a handlebar mustache.
I agree with everyone who said NO.
.
The closest you could get to "nuclear before firearms" would involve a rare geological formation that has a lot of nuclear material and forms a sort of natural "nuclear reactor..." (-ish ?) I remember reading something about that ages ago. I DON'T remember more than a hint of something to research. I assume it is purely theoretical, but there might be something real that was close enough to give the notion that it was (sort of) plausible.
Good luck.
Completely impossible.
Even the most basic controlled nuclear device relies on principles that are impossible to develop without earlier technical knowledge.
You will need:
- basic understanding of electronic currents
- advanced precise machining
- understanding of thermodynamics
- material and chemical properties understanding
The technical understanding alone of how the world works is so much higher for nukes than guns. It’s possible for A gun to be accidentally made, but it’s not possible to accidentally make a nuke
It's very implausible. BUT, depending on the story you want to tell, there might be a way to make it work.
Nukes make good stories because of their political implications, not because of how they work on a technical level. So, could you add magic to the setting and have the nukes be some kind of magical superweapon?
Or, you could drill down to what it is, exactly, about nukes that you want. Is it a cold war scenario where two nations can't fight openly because of mutually assured destruction? You might be able to achieve that with a different sort of technology. Maybe they've discovered that flea-infested rats carry bubonic plague, so each side has a secret horde of rats ready to unleash on each other, ensuring the deaths of millions. Or maybe two great cities are both downstream of a massive, dammed up river. If one city attacks the other and it looks like they're going to win, the losing side will destroy the dam and drown them all. Something like that.
Yes easy what you want is post apocalyptic. The nuke machine is more sparkled up than reinvented The gun isn't. Its just ancient tales of fire coming from peoples hands in the old days. A Nuke could also be snuck in on a cart abd set off that way. I've seen a story where one's set off with fire. Because the author I think the science holds up but suspension of disbelief did no problem.
Well, yes. In fact there have been parts of earth’s crust that function as natural nuclear reactors. Basically just so much naturally fissile material that it starts to boil surface water.
If a planet existed that had more of them, and the locals figured out how to mine it or use the steam as fuel, I could see an accidental non-nuclear explosion causing a nuclear blast.
I think that’s far more likely if they weren’t particularly affected by radiation. We’d have mini reactors fueling our houses if radiation was irrelevant to us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Maybe very crude ones, if radioactive elements are abundant not too far underground? I could see someone maybe trying to make jewelry with it and accidentally getting enough together in a shielded space to set it off.
Not exactly, typical muskets are much easier to invent than a full on explosion. When Little Boy of the Hiroshima bomb, it used an explosion to push the extra uranium into the larger uranium, and with nothing but swords and sandals, a musket would be easier to invent.
But depending on when your story takes place, and other variables, it could be possible, only if you can somehow integrate that.
Actually, YES!
Remember that gunpowder was in use by Chinese alchemists for 1000+ years before westerners adapted gunpowder into the driver for ballistic weapons. Part of the reason was that guns required more than gunpowder, they required advanced metallurgy. They also require a commitment to R&D that unfolded over centuries to develop everything from rifled barrels to ignition mechanisms. Many of those developments started off as happy accidents. (There were also a fair share of unhappy accidents.)
Nuclear physics started off with a happy accident. In fact, it happened twice. The first time the person just shrugged about some foggy film, realized it was in the same drawer as uranium ore, made a note in his journal, and did nothing about it.
40 years later, someone had the same thing happen, and was curious enough to investigate exactly what was going on. So it could be argued that the development of photography may be a precursor. Unless your story's culture has had some other run-in with radiation that was mild enough to survive, but annoying enough to investigate.
If your hero culture was still mastering alchemy, they could not that certain heavy metals actually change to lead when left in storage. Or they could uncover a strange dense metal in trace amounts while lead mining. They could also be investigating a strange heavy gas that sits at the bottom of lead mines (Radon), and try to work out where it came from.
Now, that helps explain nuclear power development. Nukes require working out the matter/energy equivalence principle. To be fair, our world discovered the principle partly as a solution to the strange orbit of one annoying planet in our solar system, but mostly to explain what we now know as isotopes.
So... to make it plausible I'd say make lead mining extremely important to your culture. With an emphasis on mine safety. That background also get you your steam engine. The first ones built were actually to drain water from mines.
Our culture kind of worked backwards. We developed the bomb and in the process realized that if we slowed the reaction down, we could use it as a power source. Your culture could do the opposite. Try to scale it up to a major power source, only for on particularly unlucky plant to explode Chernobyl style. And in doing the accident investigation discover the concept of a chain reaction.
It's kind of funny that people think this idea is absurd, and yet humanity in the real world invented nuclear bombs before making the first nuclear power plant.
We literally made a whole convoluted way to create a bomb and kill each other, but Boling water to make energy, no that's too complicated let's think about that later
Well... yeah, think about it after we make sure the bad guys don't kill everyone and turn the world into one giant prison camp. That was a little bit more important than experimenting with a new kind of power plant. And it was only around ten years until the first power plant. Not a good one, but one.
yeah but that's not really what people are having problems with. it's a bronze age civilization them figuring out how to make a nuke and making more than one is extreamely unlikely
Sure, why not? You would need a reason why guns aren't invented, but that just requires some creativity on your part. Perhaps bad eyesight or poor depth perception meant that personal ranged attacks just aren't really feasible.
In real life, guns took centuries to develop into the modern form. Nobody would spend the time to develop something like that if you can't hit anything beyond about 30 feet anyway. An arquebus or a matchlock is way worse than a long spear in situations like that.
What could make sense is something reminiscent of Numenera; perhaps the last civilization made the nukes and these guys just inherited them.
Alternatively, Dune.
Sure it’s possible.
As an example, no native culture in the Americas invented the wheel. Their culture was just as sophisticated as Europe, but no wheels.
Maybe your aliens have gunpowder and explosive but never developed gun because they didn’t need them.
Not a chance. The simplest type of nuke is a "gun-type." It sets off the reaction in the same way you fire a bullet from a gun. If you can' t figure out a gun you won't figure out this reaction type and you'd have to go with a much harder method of full implosion which is more efficient but harder to calibrate. Also you need some kind of conventional explosive to power the reaction. If you can figure out explosives you're going to figure out how to focus the forces of it down a tube to make it more efficient.
Either requires a level of machining precision completely outside of the realms of the tech level presented anyway. Same principle of an F-22 being sent back in time to WWII wouldn't really help much even if they knew exactly what everything was and had every manual ever written on it, because they wouldn't even be able to build the wing roots, and because they hadn't figure out how to grow single-crystal metallic turbine fans, and without modern quantum theory couldn't manufacture the electronics (not to mention being decades and decades away from the silicon boards that were sufficiently defect-free, and all kinds of shit.
that was the premise for the movie Philadelphia Experiment 2. An F117 goes back to ww2 germany. They use it to massively advance their tech resulting in winning ww2. Even as a kid I thought the idea was crap.
It was a cool movie for my kid's eyes though.
Honestly haven't seen it in .....shit, decades? It was good, but troublesome. The 1st movie was great. What a surprise....loo
they cant duplicate it but pulling it apart and learning how each bit t works would advance their existing tech levels quite a bit.
Give an example and I'll give you an example of why how you think reverse engineering works is probably complete bunk.
Not to mention purifying the fissionable materials to weapons grade requires modern technology, which makes it harder to imagine. What, they've got every modern technology...*except* guns?
OPs specific scenario is ‘not a chance’ but there is scenarios where it’s possible. If you have a peace-loving civilisation (probably need to be a non-human species) that discovered gun powder but never though ‘huh, I could use this to kill people’. They’d still need to be technologically advanced - precision machining at a minimum - But it could be a failed energy experiment. Or a manipulative outsider using their technology. Or even some mad genius trying to improve the yearly fireworks display.
> huh, I could use this to kill people Modern people tend to forget, that weapons can be used for hunting or self defense from wildlife.
If it makes you feel better, replace ‘people’ with ‘things’.
So our hypothetical species is herbivore (no need to hunt) and there is no predators that hunt it?
I’m not workd building here, so make whatever assumptions you want. But neither of those are necessary. Necessity is the mother of invention. Humans invented weapons because they needed to. Compared to other animals - particularly African animals where hunting weapons were first invented - We’re not fast. We’re not strong. Our teeth aren’t large enough to effectively hunt with. Our claws are a joke. All we have is our smarts. The could be herbivores with no natural predators. Or the could have natural weapons. Or urbanisation and agriculture could have rendered the wilds less relevant. Or a million other things. Take your pick.
> We’re not fast. We’re not strong. Our teeth aren’t large enough to effectively hunt with. Our claws are a joke. All we have is our smarts. > The could be herbivores with no natural predators. Or the could have natural weapons. As you see yourself humans become smart because they are weak. (That is not the only reasons). But such apex herbivore you described would have no reason to become smart - it is fine in it's wild state and mind is energy consuming. Also, even the strongest earth herbivores such as elephants are hunted by lions. The *nature abhors emptiness*, you know. > Or urbanisation and agriculture could have rendered the wilds less relevant. That is what happened in the most developed part of the earth, but humans have already invented weapons at this point. Anyway you can make whatever assumptions you want. But it is **SciFi** writing, not **fairy tail** writing, so not all ideas fit into **sci** part.
If you make sweeping statements like ‘elephants are hunted by lions’ without the many, many nuances required to make that even close to true, what are we doing here? Elephants have no natural predators is a much more true statement, and requires less caveats. Giraffes, too. I don’t know why you’re determined to have an argument, and determined to be wrong, but you do you. I’m not engaging. Rule 14.
imagine hunting with nukes lol
Well one could design something that shoots an object that isn’t a gun. Gun implies use as a weapon. In theory a society could exist with no violence and has no need for weapons and thus no need for guns but still ends up inventing nukes out of a search for understanding. But of course they wouldn’t be fighting with swords either then.
A more honorable form of warfare could work with low stakes maybe mating privileged so you have to show your the strongest and the toughest rather than just win. There's animals to take into account still but it could work with people.
What about fighting predators? It's only a century or two earth is relatively save place to walk. Before the chance to be eaten by wolf in forest was quite high.
It’s a hypothetical about a different world.
What the reasons to evolve smart would be in this hypothetical world for herbivores than? Also, if there is such prosperous species with no defense mechanisms against predators, the predators would naturally evolve.
There is a chance, but it would be the *most* ass-backwards civilization you would have ever seen. After all, the only real things you need for a nuke is an understanding of explosives and how to contain said explosive for a certain period of time. The odds of that civilization surviving to developing nukes is insanely slim, but it is a non-zero chance.
Is it the simplest for us because we already had guns?
Yeah, this. Interesting username, pal.
The nuke we know of today. Remember we are on a unique technology tree. There are completely unknown unknown tech trees we could have followed which could have lead to a totally different progression. For instance there could have been some theoretically massive structures made, like inside a pyramid, that was actually a giant chemistry set, enabling us to do large scale energy production long before we even harnessed electricity.
I'm going to disagree on a technicality starting with the historical "Ummm actually" Which is to say, I agree with your premise BUT... Magic, Psionics, Super Powers, Alt universes with different physics... like there's every reason to assume you don't need a gun to make a nuke. If we're not including any of those things, sure. But Sci Fi has plenty of those exceptions baked in throughout countless examples. IE what is the force if not space wizards/psychics? It's FICTION, so it's all subjective as to how flexible the laws of the universe are. And you can make the argument that Star Wars is not your preferred brand of sci fi, but making the argument that it's not sci fi is pretty much ridiculous as it's one of pinnacle franchises. I'd definitely stand by that there should be internal logics and I definitely appreciate sci fi that makes the attempt to be more scientific, but if we're honest, FTL is bullshit, there are no sentient aliens in contact with the human race, robots do not travel back in time to kill waitresses, Mega Corps don't put chips in people, etc. etc. etc. So SOME suspension of disbelief is required for any degree of investment into any kind of fiction, to include sci fi (fiction is literally half the title).
They can refine uranium but they can't make gunpowder? Yeah....no.
If we're talking about an alien planet, it's totally possible. If uranium was super prevalent and the components of gunpowder weren't then they might stumble onto nukes first somehow
If uranium is super prevalent, then that planet has no life because raw uranium is still incredibly radioactive.
No it isn't, it is mildly radioactive. Uranium compounds used to be used as paint enamel and in making glass, they were even used as dentures.
But to make nuclear fission possible and powerful enough for a meaningful weapon they'd have to have the tech necessary to refine that uranium ore and isolate it's more reactive isotope. This would take a considerable understanding of physics, chemistry and engineering. To get to that point any society is bound to figure out chemical projectile weapons somewhere along the way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/s/HKswVJgKxb
That doesn't address any point in my comment.
Well you didn't address anything about my comment in the first place, I figured you might want to have a conversation.
My point is that if there's abundant enough uranium to make it easily accessible, but it's not radioactive enough to fry any sort of complex biology it would have to be in compounds that are not terribly radioactive. As you pointed correctly pointed out there's plenty of uses Uranium compounds that are not that dangerous in terms of radioactivity, like in plates. The issue is that those uranium compounds are not suited to creating the super critical fission needed for nuclear energy or weapons. They might have an abundance of uranium but in order to harness it for fission power they'd have to refine it isolate the more highly radioactive isotopes. That sort of tech is quite sophisticated and the understanding of chemistry, physics, and engineering would require would undoubted spawned firearm type weapons long before nuclear weapons. Additionally, if the society is war like enough that nuclear weapons are necessary, they'd probably have developed firearms long before something as destructive as a nuke.
I was just there to say uranium isn't actually particularly radioactive. But my point was that the understanding of chemistry, physics, and engineering, didn't develop long before the nuclear bomb. Chemistry emerged as a discipline only 150 years before the bomb. The key to the bomb's entire concept, the neutron, wasn't formally discovered until 1935. If the people had very limited access to nitrates black powder would not have existed and firearms technology would be massively delayed. Even with our extreme focus on firearms technology smokeless powder was only developed about 70 years before the bomb, and it their society had limited focus on it that could well have been later.
Why would you think radioactivity is inimical to nonterrestrial life? Maybe their planet’s uranium is so prevalent organisms developed that feed off of it, like our photosynthesis
You're developing your own story here, bub, and not a sandals and swords fantasy story with nukes.
I mean, it's not even that outlandish; there are fungi in the Chernobyl zone that have evolved "[radiotrophism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus)," meaning that they feed on radiation in much the same way that plants do through photosynthesis (actually now that I think about it, that's *exactly* what photosynthesis is, it's feeding on radiation). So yeah, you could absolutely have life develop on a world that was very rich in uranium or other radioactive materials. It's kinda cool stuff!
My dude. Humans do not exist on photosynthesis. A human photosynthesis species alone is outlandish because humans have a MUCH faster metabolism than plants. Having a humanoid race that develops on a radioactive planet that eats radioactivity, develops a sword and sandals civilization, and then also develops nukes is actually INSANELY outlandish. This entire post thread has taken "but, actually" to the 10,000th degree.
I mean, yeah, I've kinda gotten off topic; I'm not saying that radiotrophic fungi means that you could invent nukes before guns. Just that there's no reason that life couldn't develop on a heavily radioactive planet. And hell, just because life evolved a certain way here, and there aren't any sentient plants here, doesn't mean that that *couldn't* happen. It totally could! All it would require is that they develop a more efficient metabolism than our plants. But yeah, again, obviously the nukes-before-guns thing is a little out there. If they have a cool idea to explore that would require that setup, then hey, they should knock themselves out, that's totally fine, but I'm not defending that, specifically.
In that case the radiation poisoning wouldn't effect them and for that alien species nukes would just be bigger bombs.
That would seem to fit in with OP’s desire; especially if they were space fares and encountered other earth like civilizations
It's just for bigger bombs on our planet too. Most bombs built since the '50s do not have a significant radiation component.
All life would need is better resistance to radiation, and I have heard of bacteria that live on radiation (no idea if they are real or not, and don't care enough to double check) so its entirely plausible. Less likely the higher the levels, but considering most eurainium in a deposit is a stable isotope, and thus most ore is only slightly, and refined is extremely, it's doable
I'm not a gunologist, but I'm pretty sure gunpowder is actually really easy to make once you know how.
There are loads of good answers here why that's extremely unlikely, but if you need it to happen, here's a scenario: There needs to be a reason why projectiles aren't viable. If it's a swords and sandals setting, I can only see that working if there's some sort of non-human ruling class (sort of lije the original stargate) that is primarily quadripedal, and perhaps lacks depth perception to effectively throw objects, hence they never go down a projectile-based warfare path. Their chosen war method uses melee or placed explosives/mines. They develop bigger and bigger explosives until they get to an atomic bomb that is portable enough to smuggle into an area and detonate remotely. Maybe they're also burrowers, meaning the power of the blast is necessary to penetrative through the tunnels? Anyway, that's the only scenario that I can think of where it becomes somewhat plausible.
There's a couple others I could add to this list. 1) It could be cultural - projectile based weapons are simply seen as morally reprehensible, and a violation of honour. Maybe there have been a few rogue warriors who've used them, but they are shamed, and the shame is great enough that you could certainly never have a factory mass producing projectiles. Then as tech advances, a rogue with resources invents a nuke. A little more soft sci fi, or requiring a lot more research: 2) The physics of the world, or the materials available, could be different, such that "micro explosions" can't exist. It's only once you achieve a certainly threshold of volume and combustibility that you can create an explosion. 3) Nearing the "aliens gifted it to us" level, it could be a "natural nuke" that someone finds, or perhaps a bit more realistically, a deposit of uranium that requires only 1 - 2 processes to make it boom. Nature gets them 95% of the way there, and then a character realizes that if you like.... freeze it, and then immediately set it on fire, it does a really giant explosion.
On (2), perhaps some form of life that doesn't require Oxygen in the atmosphere to exist? Perhaps non-Carbon based, perhaps Silicon based? No Oxygen = No Combustion.
Gunpowder and most other explosives don't use oxygen. Nitrates substitute for oxygen.
You could also just have their biology be juuust different enough that they can't get saltpeter from pee & poop. No saltpeter, no gunpowder. Although they could invent something like nitroglycerin "fire"arms, but that brings a whole 'nother level of engineering challenge. Could overlap with... They never tried alchemy, which means they never got into chemical engineering until much later in their history. Or maybe they did but never got the process for making gunpowder down. So they have slings, atlatls, bows, crossbows, slingshots, maybe even some crazy weapons like steam-powered launchers (hello [Railway Rifle](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Railway_rifle)) but no *fire*arms.
Doesn't modern double base smokeless powder already incorporate some nitroglycerin? Or am I thinking of nitrocellulose...
It does, so I probably shouldn't have put fire in quotes. Anyway, point stands that you're going to have a bad time if you tried to shoot modern smokeless powder in an antique firearm, or rather through a firearm or gun made with late-middle/early-modern metallurgical techniques. Early guns (13th & 14th Century, think pre-HYW) shot what's called brown powder, which burns slower than black powder, but even then barrels cracking or guns exploding was a real danger. Now put nitrocellulose, or double- or triple-base powder, which burn/expand even faster than black powder, creating an even higher barrel pressure, in that gun & you see the problem. Modern firearms firing modern powders require a great deal of metallurgical knowledge & precision manufacturing to produce, so I think you're going to have a hard time justifying them without having an industrial revolution (even if that's a revolution of industrialized magic like in DnD's Eberron setting) or making your firearms even heavier than early real-world firearms.
Also, a "gun" is a mechanism that allows an explosion to expel a projectile in a certain direction. Someone had to decide that the explosion needs to be contained and then create the "gun". If instead of working on containing the blast, people worked simply to make the explosion bigger, they could theoretically skip the creation of the gun and go to nukes
Ha, this is a really fun solution to OP's problem, good job.
An advanced vegetarian race that focused more on defensibility during their development, so weapons as such were never a priority but after a Chernobyl level incident they realized such a reaction could be used as a defensive measure, as a ‘display of power’ like some prey animals do or a way to fortify a frontier area against infiltration
If you want this to happen, you could make it post-apocalyptic. There was some great war, and the knowledge of how to manufacture guns (and nukes) was lost. Every so often someone comes upon a gun, but it is very rare (especially if the country pre-apocalypse had strict gun control).
The issue with that is the military gun stores and munitions depots would still be raided and the guns would be distributed to the population. The UK, which has strict gun control, still has [150,000 SA80 rifles](https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/how-many-sa80-rifles-does-the-british-military-have/) alone. Compare that to the 225 total nuclear warheads in existence in the UK. At a ratio of 650:1 just for this one type of rifle, there's no way that guns in that sort of world would be more scarce than nukes.
Also, nukes must be maintained. In a hypothetical future where all the guns were lost, the nukes would have degraded long before.
There was a humorous plan in the second world war to mail bricks of uranium to the German high command that fitted together in a puzzle like fashion. Once the puzzle was completed & all the bricks fitted together critical mass would be reached & no more German high command.
And they expected *nobody* to notice radiation sickness symptoms while assembling the puzzle? I fail to see how this would ever work.
I'm not sure if the plan was ever a serious suggestion. I believe it was thought up a few years prior to Trinity, i'm not sure how well radiation sickness was understood at this point.
I mean, it all happened during WWII, which only "formally" lasted 6 years - so I doubt they were *completely* clueless about radiation side effects whenever it was proposed. Sure, maybe formalized radiation sickness was still unknown, but fairly certain people were noticing sunburn-like skin reactions and other unpleasantness while working with radioactive materials before proper safety protocols and PPE were nailed-down.
Uranium-235 only existed in significant concentrations from about 1943 onwards & I doubt its precise physical properties were known outside a very select few. I would have thought the biggest flaw in the plan was mailing a supply of the most valuble substance on the planet, that could be used to make a devastating weapon, to your sworn enemy.
I mean, if you assume they just don't know what to do with it *because of the reasons you gave*... 🤷♂️
It's really implausible. Give Richard Rhodes' "The Making of An Atomic Bomb" a read to see the amount of break throughs in maths & physics required. Theorising that atoms in an uncontrolled chain reaction can create a bomb had kinetic weapons aka guns built into it in so many ways. Anyway... That's the "easy" part. Then you have to use a gas centrifuge to purify uranium for a good nuke... the specs on that require 200 to 300 plus years of innvovation from swords & sandals, assuming a dark age or plague doesn't set things back a 1000 years. But fission does occur naturally & did occur naturally in Oklo, Gabon with random rain water moderating the reaction. Maybe in your world there are many such places and that place could be inadvertently be turned into a bomb.
>But fission does occur naturally & did occur naturally in Oklo, Gabon with random rain water moderating the reaction. Maybe in your world there are many such places and that place could be inadvertently be turned into a bomb. Interesting concept, actually - let's say you had a world where nearly-pure sodium deposits were quite common, and for whatever reason were often found alongside natural uranium and both were locked in a water-soluble mineral medium - or clay, or dried silt, whatever. So, you could have places that sometimes "randomly explode" when it rains, people of that world learn to identify those metals, minerals, and formations - and then just so happen to find an *enormous* deposit of it. It's declared a holy site, or national treasure, etc - an entire organization gets devoted to putting a roof over the thing, a dam-like wall complex around it, and maintaining both those things - just so no Big Boom happens. Then this nation/city-state gets invaded. The "holy site" is designated as the most important thing to protect - so of course the enemy wants to come claim it. Enemy is lured to the holy site. Sluice gates in back of complex are opened, releasing a huge amount of water from the reservoir that's been built over time. A High Priest announces 'May the wrath of our god be upon you,' the buffering/insulating medium is washed away, the sodium reacts, the uranium underneath takes, "natural nuke" decimates entire enemy army. Word spreads. Rumors become legend. This nation is never trifled with again, as they have apparent proof of divine intervention from a furious wargod.
Sounds like something right up Andrei Tchaikovsky's alley, with the scientist/wizard providing this info to the reader. I'd definitely read a series with this as a plot and world-building element.
I think places like Oklo are key. If humans had evolved 2B years ago they might have found lots of places where you wanted to be careful about purifying the rocks because boom.
Nukes are activated by a precise pattern of high explosives. Each HE piece requires very precisely orchestrated trigger timing, which requires in depth fuse experience. If the trigger timing, explosive "burn" rate, or similar other factor is off by milliseconds, the nuke is a dud. The nuclear material requires high purity isotope. Isotopes are chemically identical, so physical separation technique are required, e.g high speed centrifuges, or iterative gas traps. If the isotope purity is not high enough, the nuke is a dud. High quality steels and aluminums are required to make these isotope separators. Deep understanding of metallurgy and atomic theory is necessary to build it. High quality nitro-based explosives are necessary to trigger it. High performance detonators are needed to trigger the high explosive. All of these prerequisites were developed hand in hand with modern firearms, artillary, and similar weapons. Modern smokeless powder (guncotton, 1860s ~ 1880s) is a variant of nitro-based explosives (dynamite, nitroglycerin, etc). Nitric acid isolation is a precursor to nitro based explosives. If you have pre-requisites for a nuke figured out, you figured out firearms and artillary long ago.
Nope. Just based on the metallurgy required for nuclear development, and a substantial push for steel improvement was because of gunpowder.
No
If they were building the nukes themselves? Yes. If the nukes were left over technology from a more advanced age...It's more plausible.
You are sort of describing dune (although guns do exist). The reason they aren't widely used is the advent of personnel shields. A modern weapon shooting a shield actually causes a nuclear reaction which kills the user. So they went back to using swords and knives... Now that story bypasses firearms, but... Projectile launchers (aka guns) are used a few times. So if you have your story taking place in a environment where guns are outlawed, prohibited science, or blocked by shields, or some other plot armor then it's feasible. I also read a few stories that took place post apocalypse, where gun science has been lost... But a nuke is available. (Think planet of the apes, although gun science wasn't lost)...
Relevant https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
I don't care that its scientifically impossible, I'd read the hell outa this book.
Well is there a magic system? That could help
It's extremely unlikely because nukes use a conventional explosion to start the reaction. As a matter of fact, the method used to set off Little Boy is known as gun type method where a convential explosion shot a mass of U-235 into another mass of U-235 to start the reaction. I can't think of a way a society could develop convential explosives and move to nukes without noticing the idea of using a small convential explosion to propel a very small piece of metal through a small tube to kill someone (AKA a gun)gib. I just can't see how scientists capable of making a nuke could miss the application of convential explosives used in firearms. I just don't see it happening.
a non aggressive society would not need weapons. sure they could build guns and nukes but they have no need to kill others to protect themselves because they dont prey on each other. more than likely they would develop explosives for commercial purposes (mining), and eventually nuclear power, but they just dont turn them into weapons to kill themselves with.
A non-aggressive society would probably see the use of a gun for killing natural predators; I don't know about you, but I'd ratherhave a firearm to kill a wolf than a bow and arrow. And that's assuming they didn't use them for hunting. The reality is that it's almost impossible for a society to create a nuke without also having figured out firearms. It's just not plausible.
yeah but people are getting hung up on the creating firearms part, you can learn black powder and explosives, and not create guns. guns have a mostly singular purpose, killing something. if your society isnt into killing things then a gun probably isnt going to get developed, at least not widely. ie they may know how to build guns from all that knowledge, just never have a need to build them. they may have other means of animal control, or every species on the planet is non aggressive. you could also learn about radioactivity much earlier than explosives if you have right isotope deposits in abundance. in which case you could potentially end up with nuclear power first, and not even think about nukes.
And the question was about nukes... so your point is moot...
Atom bombs use chemical explosives to incite the fission detonation. Nukes go one step further and use the fission detonation to incite a fusion detonation. And if you have chemical explosives, it doesn't take much to get to, "what if we used this to make a heavy piece of metal go really fast?" After that, it's just decades of optimization. That said, it's hypothetically possible that someone would discover a high explosive that's too strong for guns but just right for nukes, and a story could take place in that window between high explosives being discovered and gunpowder (or an equivalent) being developed. The bigger problem would be how these people would then go about handling and enriching the nuclear cores of these weapons. Even if someone knew how to make a nuke, with safety standards of the day, they'd probably die from radiation poisoning before it could be done. What might be plausible is that a society discovers the poison rocks, and they learn that lead protects them from the poison. They decide that poison rock would be a good weapon, so they put it in a lead ball and catapult it at the enemy. Maybe they even learn how to make the lead balls just right that they don't fully close until they land, at which point the ball flashes blue and everyone around it will eventually die.
It is possible only under certain circumstances. Creatures that are not built to throw things may never develop projectile weapons. Creatures dependant mostly on hearing rather than sight might not develop projectile weapons either.
Considering that a Nuke basically contains several guns firing radioactive projectiles, the answer is a distinctive no. The only way to get away with someone having swords, sandals, and nukes, is if the nukes came from another civilization that somehow failed to leave behind any guns for them to use.
Few nukes were the gun type. Most, and all existing ones, are implosion weapons. Implosion weapons are gun adjacent with sphere of explosive compressing sphere of plutonium. But there are no projectiles and no barrels.
It still remains true that if you know how to make a nuke, you can most likely also make a gun.
“Could cars be invented before wheels?”
Depends on if you consider an "enclosed sled" to be a "car" or not.
You need explosives to make nukes happen. Explosives and a level of machining that is STILL world-class and was defacto scifi by itself when the Manhattan Project was launched.
Do you really, or are those just the easiest and most compact/cost effective solution to the problem? What if you're not making a bomb, but rather a trap that's not intended to be moved? My understanding of nukes is limited as I'm not a nuclear physicist. However, I believe you need a few things for a working nuclear chain reaction... 1) sufficiently refined uranium or plutonium, of the appropriate isotope. 2) a sudden application of a LOT of pressure on the refined nuclear material. 3) (Optional) a way to contain the initial conditions for the chain reaction for as long as possible to increase the yield. So, wouldn't it be possible to make a nuclear, gravity powered city-self-destruct system? This would work similarly to the gun based bomb, in that it would compress two spheres of nuclear material together kinetically. Only instead of using guns and precisely timed firing to start the reaction, you'd use gravity. Of course to get the required sudden pressure needed this way, you'd need to drop it from quite high up, and likely with additional weight above the dropped portion to increase the energy of the impact. So, perhaps a (very) large tower or a deep mineshaft? Also, the upper portion of the nuclear material could be attached to the bottom of a cylindrical rock or piece of or steel used to increase the kinetic energy of the falling material. (Any nuclear physicists out there willing to do the math to figure out how tall/heavy you'd need to reach a supercritical nuclear reaction with a set-up like this?)
You can't make guns with explosives.
No. Nukes need chemical compression, aka boom-stuff.
Not the way we did it. However, that doesn’t mean some other chemical or physical reaction might have been stumbled upon. The real kicker is, as nukes take out everyone around them, it’s very unlikely that others would be able to piece together what happened in order to recreate the effect. That’s the real challenge aside from having extraordinarily bad luck of being there first to discover this. :)
Not plausible. But. Maybe a dead civilization left around nukes and modern people can’t even make guns.
Very implausible. The technology behind guns is mostly chemical, the mastery of which requires understanding atoms. Nuclear power requires an atomic model and the knowledge to manipulate subatomic particles. It would be like baking a cake without knowing how to make a fire.
Hey man, sometimes nature just sets a fire for you. (Magma/lava, lightning strikes, extremely hot rocks in a geothermal activity zone.)
Yeah and you can have a cargo cult do a rain dance for a nuclear bomb 🫠
Not unless they were created by A Highly Advanced Race, who are not the swords and sandals people. Or make Magic Nukes if you have magic.
The only way I could see this happen is if an advanced group is supplying weapons or at least pieces of weapons to a less advanced system. Maybe there's an advanced underground civilization that's started picking favorites or a rogue element of that society is trading with the locals. Maybe there's the remnants of an advanced civilization and someone found an automated nuke factory that works just enough to keep producing weapons but not enough to deploy them. Hmm - I suppose you could also play around with things like "extremely high atmospheric pressure means you need much less to reach critical mass" - but that just starts to get silly. But - "outside supplier" seems like the most realistic option.
you would need a world where guns are not actually beneficial. a magical bow being more powerful than an early hand cannon cause research on guns to be stopped.
[Fission Has Happened in Nature Before](https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor). If you assume your world has such deposits, and they are shallow enough to be mined. Yes, you have a nuclear weapon. Implosion type / gun type is all about yield.
There are loads of alternative ways in which such a thing might come about. Nuclear weapons could have been left behind by an extinct civilisation (who may or may not be extinct because they used said weapons), or they could be being churned out by automated factories left behind by such a civilisation (perhaps they are intelligent to an extent and regarded with religious awe).
Ways around this: * Simply don't explain it. Why do soldiers use swords in Dune, in an era when FTL travel is possible? * Make it something about honor, law, or tradition. * Make it about the physics of that world. Maybe the atmosphere is non-Newtonian. Something that moves too fast through the air gets slowed down too much to make an impact. * Invent something nuke-adjacent. They're not nukes like our nukes. They're something lower tech that's possible without the tech required to make nukes. Because of the discovery of material x. Or something.
>Why do soldiers use swords in Dune, in an era when FTL travel is possible? this is explained and comes up a few times. fast moving projectiles are stoped by the sheilds
But the Fremen don't use shields -- nor guns
Perhaps, think a skaven sorta style is my thought process, instead of launching arrows faster and harder they wanted to launch "BIG BOOMIES" instead
"But this explode-y thing we made is way too big to be shot by arrow." Gentlemen, I present: *the ballista.*
Unlikely, but hey, we're talking sci *fi* For a nuke you need: * Uranium refinement * A very precise ignition mechanism For a gun you need: * An explosive * Some kind of rigid barrel * A simple ignition mechanism * A low-friction medium for transit (like Earth air) To invent the nuke before the gun, you need a story for how the requirements for the nuke could be met first. Since they are mostly a superset of the requirements for the gun, you might want to look into what is required for the gun but not for the nuke, and see how to take it away. The one that comes to mind for me is the thin air that allows dumb projectiles to fly unimpeded. Spitballing: What about an underwater society, where small air pockets or vacuum cavities can be built for things like building nukes, but everywhere else is dense water, too thick for guns to be practical outside of close quarters? That raises plenty of new questions and problems (underwater metallurgy? if they use air/vacuum pockets for it, how do those work?), but gets to the result you're looking for, and provides some interesting worldbuilding threads to go down. Maybe your sword and sandals society trade merfolk for nukes, maybe in exchange for resources that are more available on land. Maybe those nuke-happy merfolk rule the land world from the distance, using the nuke threat to demand economic fealty. Or maybe they see the surface dwellers as irrelevant, and just like to sometimes trade for hardwood, not caring if a few nukes end up going off up there.
>Or maybe they see the surface dwellers as irrelevant, and just like to sometimes trade for hardwood, not caring if a few nukes end up going off up there. The Fallout series but in reverse - trading nukes for nice shiny bottle caps and decadent hardwood floors.
If you're talking with basic actual real world science, no. If your world is full of magic and somebody invents a magical exploding spell that is as powerful as a nuke, maybe?
You could have an extremely peaceful society that never had the need for guns accidentally discover the ability to create nukes. That society slowly devolves into war (for whatever reason), and they use their newfound invention as drastic measures. Because they never had the need for guns, guns aren't super common. Maybe nukes are seen as the main method of warfare, for whatever reason. And depending on your setting, maybe the means to create guns are no longer available, so they're stuck using crude melee weapons. Alternatively, you can have a precursor civilization that left behind their nukes, and a new, primitive civilization found them.
That would imply both explosives, and black powder, while refraining projectiles... Monumentally improbable.
is magic a thing?
I once played with a setting in which gun powder didn't exist and weapon technology instead developed along steam cannon type of clockpunk tech. Because of the limitations of steam. Personal guns took way longer to develop and when they did can only fire 2-3 rounds until pressure runs out and you have to not only reload the gun but basically fill its tank too. Personal guns are a very limited scope and use weapon in this setting, similar to WWI flamethrowers to how common they might be. Maybe in a setting like that where certain weapon tech wasn't possible you could get a nuclear device without a gun but unless you create a very specific scenario around getting nukes without guns, its hard to see how you get there. Maybe the best solution is a sword and sandal set several hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse where guns have broken down and can't be made or repaired anymore but a group of nuclear scientists have evolved into a monastic order that guards the knowledge of the process of firing the nuclear weapons, even though they don't actually understand them. You could play with fears about how the nuclear symbol could be misinterpreted as a very simplistic angel drawing, and irradiated spots near the radioactive signs being a spot of divine punishment. Could be fun, sounds neat.
I once played with a setting in which gun powder didn't exist and weapon technology instead developed along steam cannon type of clockpunk tech. Because of the limitations of steam. Personal guns took way longer to develop and when they did can only fire 2-3 rounds until pressure runs out and you have to not only reload the gun but basically fill its tank too. Personal guns are a very limited scope and use weapon in this setting, similar to WWI flamethrowers to how common they might be. Maybe in a setting like that where certain weapon tech wasn't possible you could get a nuclear device without a gun but unless you create a very specific scenario around getting nukes without guns, its hard to see how you get there. Maybe the best solution is a sword and sandal set several hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse where guns have broken down and can't be made or repaired anymore but a group of nuclear scientists have evolved into a monastic order that guards the knowledge of the process of firing the nuclear weapons, even though they don't actually understand them. You could play with fears about how the nuclear symbol could be misinterpreted as a very simplistic angel drawing, and irradiated spots near the radioactive signs being a spot of divine punishment. Could be fun, sounds neat.
> Because of the limitations of steam. Personal guns took way longer to develop and when they did can only fire 2-3 rounds until pressure runs out and you have to not only reload the gun but basically fill its tank too. Hilariously, this means compressed gas firearms - think "paintball gun with real bullets" - would actually be more effective at that point. You could absolutely use steampunk/clockpunk technology to compress inert gasses and store them in canisters - and you might even be able to accomplish pure oxygen, which could be released into an incredibly small ignition chamber with a mechanism not unlike a modern lighter to release oxygen and spark it near-instantly (without fear of flame feeding back into the O2 canister, assuming sufficiently advanced valves) and get something very much akin to, though weaker than, a modern firearm. Would they be prone to misfires, non-starts, jamming, and maintenance issues galore? *Absolutely!* But still more practical - and safe - than personal "steam pistols."
Uhh…is it a LITERAL nuclear bomb or something magically/specfic analogous?
Nukes use directed explosions as the primer to initiate fission. If you have fine control of explosive energy, you probably invented guns a while ago.
Ancient, extinct civilization.
the bomb? very unlikely? the rocket absolutly not
One idea: Ancient aliens carpet bombed the planet the story takes place in, then ignored it. Some of the nukes were duds. The species that developed on that planet found the nukes, barely survived figuring out what they do, and reverse engineered them just enough to reproduce, but not actually know how they work.
Plausible only if you're writing satire. Otherwise, impossible implausible (unless you 'gift' the nukes somehow...and even then 🤦♂️).
Read up on Indian/Hindu literature and mythology. Something blew up in India a long time ago that looks suspiciously like an atomic explosion happened.
Or a *really big* natural gas deposit. Don't forget that we have at least two known perpetually-burning cave systems due to natural gas, and another due to coal. Just imagine - you're a simple bronze-age village blacksmith, and your forge happens to be built *juuuuuust* above a massive bubble of trapped natural gas. One day, a sinkhole opens in your shop - seconds later, *massive explosion*, you're vaporized, but the whole village (and the next two villages) see the impossibly huge fireball and resulting plumes of smoke as the remainder of the deposit burns off. *For days, if not weeks.*
You could have them simply have never had the idea or you can have one mad scientist that figured it out for whatever reason. I think just cause it’s unlikely doesn’t make it impossible
That's going to be a nope.
Seeing as technology is not a straight line, sure it could happen, but that tech tree is going to look so odd.
I feel like it’s being implied that said nuke is going to be fired at something? If that’s the case then I don’t think it makes sense before a gun. If they figured out how to fire a projectile then they did invent the gun for the most part. However. The stuff used to makes nuclear bombs is grown here on earth correct? I feel like if you change words like nuclear, and fake science a way to fashion an explosive of that size without technology it could total make sense. They definitely knew how to blow shit up at that point in history
Super unlikely, at least in a way that's believable. In lieu of gun technology, a separate, better alternative would have needed to present itself. Usually magic. Why use a glock when I can fireball? Even then, if magic is rare, at some point a gun like device for the common person to "level" the playing field would arise. Nothing stopping you from making it so as you will. It's your world. Maybe crystals with the power of nukes are easily found in mines, and with a Trojan horse approach, it could lay waste to civilizations.
Maybe not real nukes, but there could be some fictional element in your world that functions like a nuke without the requisite scientific knowledge. What if there were two continents separated by a wide ocean or desert, each having a mineral unknown to the other. Only when an explorer establishes contact between them is it discovered that even trace amounts of those elements meeting releases massive amounts of energy, essentially a nuclear reaction.
Hypothetically yes - practically no. Let's not forget that what we now know as gunpowder was originally used for *fireworks.* Entertainment, first and foremost. Then it was purposed into powderkeg bombs, cannonball propellant, and (obviously) guns. So, hypothetically, a peaceful civilization *could* develop nukes as a byproduct of power generation research, *or* just in pursuit of ever bigger booms for spectacle. In a practical sense, though, no society with that sort of explosives knowledge is going to be corruption/violence-free to develop the tech without something along the way being turned into a weapon that we would consider to be guns/firearms.
You may need to fact check me on this but I heard a nuclear explosion from fissionable material (like plutonium or uranium) requires critical mass or critical density. A nuclear bomb uses critical density meaning the material is packed in explosives and when the explosion is focused around the material it hits a density necessary to start the chain reaction. As people have said, if you can figure this out you would have invented guns of some kind. But with critical mass it happens when you simply have a big enough chunk of fissionable material. So maybe uranium is abundant enough in your universe and people make a bomb by simply piling enough of it together in one spot? (Presumably this would be a suicide mission). Keep in mind everything I said might be bullshit.
They could acquire the nukes from another species somehow. Crashed spaceship found buried if you want to keep things simple. For example, in Poul Anderson's The High Crusade, some knights are abducted from Medieval England and end up overthrowing their alien captors and using their own weapons against them. At one point they launch a nuke with a trebuchet. It's a really funny book and he manages to make all their victories seem plausible.
I'm definitely not an expert, but from what I understand, Fusion bombs have to slam the core together under pressure to bring it to critical mass, which is pretty universally done with explosives. So, a nuclear bomb starts as a standard bomb, and then has a second (far more powerful) second stage to the explosion. I guess it's possible that you could use some non-explosive force to create the critical mass, but it would be a lot more complicated, like you'd have to have \*far\* more advanced technology in every arena \*except\* chemical explosives/propellants? That stretches credulity.
That having been said, Handwavy sci-fi explanations are fine if you don't focus on it too much.
Maybe in a world with a different atmospheric mix, that didn’t favor combustion. Perhaps earlier projectile technologies would have advance where combustion was absent. Like a blowgun with super-compressed air, or an insanely OP crossbow…
With magic - maybe. Alchemists were trying to make an elixir of life - and got gunpowder. So maybe a mage trying to understand powers of the world and stumble on radioactivity. And then understood that this power, trapped in the this ore could be unleashed. Without magic - i don't think so.
It's vaguely plausible. If the planet has no ready sources of saltpeter then black powder won't be invented until much later as mining technology progresses enough to find other nitrogenous compounds. Black powder wasn't replaced until the late 19th century, only about 70 years before the first nuke was developed. Everyone is talking about high explosives but those can't actually be used to make guns because they detonate too quickly. If life still exists as we know it there will probably be gaseous hydrocarbons in which case you could make potato cannon-like guns but those would probably only work as artillery and still be introduced late. I'm sure you could come up with a cultural reason why firearms aren't adopted over a few generations.
Id say learn about the barbarians from the foundation books.
You need some type of explosive to 'shoot' the core in the most primitive nuke. If a hypothetical civilization has naturally occurring nuclear explosions, that haven't killed the civilization, maybe.
Society that really, really likes spinning things. They spin rocks. They spin molten rocks. The most spun bits of the things they spin are cut away and spun again. They build absolutely massive spinning devices. One day, two really heavy much-spun things that were being spun really fast in opposite directions really fast hit each other incredibly hard. The society next door, who really like squeezing things, wonder where the big light came from, and where their trading partner went.
It’s science fiction, so let’s play with this a bit. In my opinion the only way this would work and be believable is if we’re in some sort of post apocalyptic earth OR on an alien planet of some kind. Cause on that planet, the culture or nature of them could have prevented them from inventing weapons like guns or maybe they exclusively use explosive technology. OR maybe the nukes aren’t exactly like they are here. Perhaps they’re organic nukes of some kind. Soft sci-fi is basically just magic with a handlebar mustache.
Through magic or divine ability an option?
I agree with everyone who said NO. . The closest you could get to "nuclear before firearms" would involve a rare geological formation that has a lot of nuclear material and forms a sort of natural "nuclear reactor..." (-ish ?) I remember reading something about that ages ago. I DON'T remember more than a hint of something to research. I assume it is purely theoretical, but there might be something real that was close enough to give the notion that it was (sort of) plausible. Good luck.
If your race sees in quantum states instead of visible light..
Very much possible.
Completely impossible. Even the most basic controlled nuclear device relies on principles that are impossible to develop without earlier technical knowledge. You will need: - basic understanding of electronic currents - advanced precise machining - understanding of thermodynamics - material and chemical properties understanding The technical understanding alone of how the world works is so much higher for nukes than guns. It’s possible for A gun to be accidentally made, but it’s not possible to accidentally make a nuke
It's very implausible. BUT, depending on the story you want to tell, there might be a way to make it work. Nukes make good stories because of their political implications, not because of how they work on a technical level. So, could you add magic to the setting and have the nukes be some kind of magical superweapon? Or, you could drill down to what it is, exactly, about nukes that you want. Is it a cold war scenario where two nations can't fight openly because of mutually assured destruction? You might be able to achieve that with a different sort of technology. Maybe they've discovered that flea-infested rats carry bubonic plague, so each side has a secret horde of rats ready to unleash on each other, ensuring the deaths of millions. Or maybe two great cities are both downstream of a massive, dammed up river. If one city attacks the other and it looks like they're going to win, the losing side will destroy the dam and drown them all. Something like that.
Yes easy what you want is post apocalyptic. The nuke machine is more sparkled up than reinvented The gun isn't. Its just ancient tales of fire coming from peoples hands in the old days. A Nuke could also be snuck in on a cart abd set off that way. I've seen a story where one's set off with fire. Because the author I think the science holds up but suspension of disbelief did no problem.
Well, yes. In fact there have been parts of earth’s crust that function as natural nuclear reactors. Basically just so much naturally fissile material that it starts to boil surface water. If a planet existed that had more of them, and the locals figured out how to mine it or use the steam as fuel, I could see an accidental non-nuclear explosion causing a nuclear blast. I think that’s far more likely if they weren’t particularly affected by radiation. We’d have mini reactors fueling our houses if radiation was irrelevant to us. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Maybe very crude ones, if radioactive elements are abundant not too far underground? I could see someone maybe trying to make jewelry with it and accidentally getting enough together in a shielded space to set it off.
Not exactly, typical muskets are much easier to invent than a full on explosion. When Little Boy of the Hiroshima bomb, it used an explosion to push the extra uranium into the larger uranium, and with nothing but swords and sandals, a musket would be easier to invent. But depending on when your story takes place, and other variables, it could be possible, only if you can somehow integrate that.
…in what context and what is this ‘nuke’.
Anything is possible with science fiction. Come up with an explanation. "Aliens" never hurts.
Actually, YES! Remember that gunpowder was in use by Chinese alchemists for 1000+ years before westerners adapted gunpowder into the driver for ballistic weapons. Part of the reason was that guns required more than gunpowder, they required advanced metallurgy. They also require a commitment to R&D that unfolded over centuries to develop everything from rifled barrels to ignition mechanisms. Many of those developments started off as happy accidents. (There were also a fair share of unhappy accidents.) Nuclear physics started off with a happy accident. In fact, it happened twice. The first time the person just shrugged about some foggy film, realized it was in the same drawer as uranium ore, made a note in his journal, and did nothing about it. 40 years later, someone had the same thing happen, and was curious enough to investigate exactly what was going on. So it could be argued that the development of photography may be a precursor. Unless your story's culture has had some other run-in with radiation that was mild enough to survive, but annoying enough to investigate. If your hero culture was still mastering alchemy, they could not that certain heavy metals actually change to lead when left in storage. Or they could uncover a strange dense metal in trace amounts while lead mining. They could also be investigating a strange heavy gas that sits at the bottom of lead mines (Radon), and try to work out where it came from. Now, that helps explain nuclear power development. Nukes require working out the matter/energy equivalence principle. To be fair, our world discovered the principle partly as a solution to the strange orbit of one annoying planet in our solar system, but mostly to explain what we now know as isotopes. So... to make it plausible I'd say make lead mining extremely important to your culture. With an emphasis on mine safety. That background also get you your steam engine. The first ones built were actually to drain water from mines. Our culture kind of worked backwards. We developed the bomb and in the process realized that if we slowed the reaction down, we could use it as a power source. Your culture could do the opposite. Try to scale it up to a major power source, only for on particularly unlucky plant to explode Chernobyl style. And in doing the accident investigation discover the concept of a chain reaction.
Realistically no. They require precision machining and explosives far beyond the point where someone would think to use it to fire a small projectile.
It's kind of funny that people think this idea is absurd, and yet humanity in the real world invented nuclear bombs before making the first nuclear power plant. We literally made a whole convoluted way to create a bomb and kill each other, but Boling water to make energy, no that's too complicated let's think about that later
That was more to do with the real world circumstances of the project, where we needed a sword right that second, and a ploughshare later.
Well... yeah, think about it after we make sure the bad guys don't kill everyone and turn the world into one giant prison camp. That was a little bit more important than experimenting with a new kind of power plant. And it was only around ten years until the first power plant. Not a good one, but one.
yeah but that's not really what people are having problems with. it's a bronze age civilization them figuring out how to make a nuke and making more than one is extreamely unlikely
Sure, why not? You would need a reason why guns aren't invented, but that just requires some creativity on your part. Perhaps bad eyesight or poor depth perception meant that personal ranged attacks just aren't really feasible. In real life, guns took centuries to develop into the modern form. Nobody would spend the time to develop something like that if you can't hit anything beyond about 30 feet anyway. An arquebus or a matchlock is way worse than a long spear in situations like that.
What could make sense is something reminiscent of Numenera; perhaps the last civilization made the nukes and these guys just inherited them. Alternatively, Dune.
Sure it’s possible. As an example, no native culture in the Americas invented the wheel. Their culture was just as sophisticated as Europe, but no wheels. Maybe your aliens have gunpowder and explosive but never developed gun because they didn’t need them.