Keklas Rekobah wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 2:37 pmThe shock waves alone would likely rupture the hulls of any submarines 'lucky' enough to avoid a direct hit. There would be no one left to fish, and no fish left, either.Bamax wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 12:52 amThe nuclear submarine guys could ride it out. Fish when they need food.Keklas Rekobah wrote: ↑Tue Nov 16, 2021 8:43 pmIf by "clean" you mean "not lethally radioactive for the next million years", then dropping space-rocks would be the preferred method, as it may only eject enough dust into the air to prevent photosynthesis for a few years, thus starving the native population. Once the dust settles and all the natives are dead, you move your troops and colonists in and repopulate the world. But if by "clean", you mean "maintaining a life-supportive environment", then neither space rocks nor nukes are acceptable, and a full-scale genocide must be carried out by orbital, air, sea, and ground troops in a protracted war of attrition. Finally, if your goal is to make the world uninhabitable for anyone for the foreseeable future, then reducing the world's surface to radioactive ash and slag is the way to go. ANYWAY, we seem to have gone way off-topic.
The intent of a total planetary scrub is to wipe out all forms of life on a planetary surface, including in the oceans. A planetary scrub with space rocks would either boil the seas or splash them up onto land -- likely both. The Chicxulub Event was just one asteroid, so Imagine the Chicxulub Event happening a thousand times over the entire surface (oceans too) of an Earth-sized planet. Some of those rocks would target geologic faults; others would target volcanos and volcanic fields, and the rest would target industrial centers, airports, harbors, and densely-populated urban areas. For example, just one hit from a hundred-meter asteroid on the Yellowstone Caldera would trigger a mega-volcanic event more than 1,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. A thousand such volcanos would fill the atmosphere with dust, ash, and sulfur dioxide, which would combine with steam from the boiling seas and form sulfuric acid.
A total planetary scrub is not a warning; it is a final solution on a global scale.
Depends on how thorough one is and how much intel one has on the planet they are bombarding.
Aliens won't neccesarily know a world's weak points to target them.
Incidentally, world powers of our modern world actually are aware of them and have said as much that if a nuclear exchange ever occurred, all weak points like you mentioned would be nuked