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[[File:sonic-rainbomb 3222.png|link=My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|frame| ''[[Dr. Strangelove|We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when...]]'']]
{{quote|''"That was the secret of secrets," said the Queen Jadis. "It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it."''
|''[[The Magician's Nephew]]''}}
In a fantasy setting featuring [[Fantasy Gun Control]], [[Medieval Stasis]], and assorted other reasons why the culture would never develop anything even ''close'' to nuclear weaponry, there may be some form of magic attack so powerful and destructive that it is obviously a stand-in for nuclear weapons. Compare to how [[Automatic Crossbows]] stand in for guns. [[Kamehame Hadoken]], [[Wave Motion Gun]] and [[Person of Mass Destruction]] are common ways of invoking it.
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{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* The “Dragon Slave” from ''[[Slayers]]''.
** Also “Blast Bomb” (Fire element spell capable doing purely physical damage) and “Ra Tilt” (Spirit Shamanism doing damage only on the astral plane) are considered to be equivalent in power.
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** There's also Fairy Law, a spell that can annihilate everything in a radius of miles that the caster considers an enemy. If it's in the middle of a battlefield where you need to be selective about what you're hitting (like you don't want to hit your friends), it's simply an extremely precise [[Wave Motion Gun]] that destroys enemies without hurting allies. However, if the caster were, say, in enemy territory, surrounded by enemy units, then it would probably rival Aetherion in it's capability for taking huge numbers of lives in an instant. Thankfully, only master class magicians are capable of casting spells like this.
** Then there's Acnologia Roar {{spoiler|apperantly capable of wiping out an entire island and leaves no traces.}}
* When Louise uses Void Magic for the first time in [[
== [[Fan Works]] ==
== Fanfiction ==▼
* In ''[[Fallout Equestria]]'' and its derived works, "balefire bombs" were instrumental in causing the postapocalyptic world described in the stories. They are clear analogues to nuclear weapons.
** Referenced in ''[http://www.fimfiction.net/story/877/Under-The-Northern-Lights Under The Northern Lights]'', an otherwise unrelated ''Friendship Is Magic'' fanfic. Twilight Sparkle stops a bomb-throwing assassin who seems to be destroyed by his own bomb when Twilight traps him and the bomb within a forcefield. Media and gossip make this into a "balefire bomb" to the ire of Twilight because balefire bombs are just theoretical weapons, no assassin is stupid enough to use a nuke-equivalent to kill someone, and nopony could contain a balefire blast like that.
* In the Czech film ''Císařův pekař - Pekařův císař'' the golem is an obvious analogy for nuclear power. (The villains attempt to use the golem to rule the world and get killed in the process, while the hero goes to use it for the good of all.)▼
== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[Discworld]]'':
** The civil war that breaks out between the wizards in ''[[
** There are areas mentioned repeatedly throughout the series but never shown where fallout from spells like this in ancient wizard conflicts make them uninhabitable.
** Furthermore, in ''[[
** Pratchett is quite fond of using the adjective "thaumaturgical" in relation to the Mage Wars, almost certainly due to its similariry to "thermonuclear".
** ''[[
** Pratchett was in fact formerly a scientific journalist specialising in nuclear physics, so his books are full of in-jokes about the subject.
** There's a reference to the Mage Wars in ''[[Going Postal (Discworld)|Going Postal]]'' which makes this more explicit:
{{quote|Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again.}}
** ''[[The Science of Discworld]]'' involves the magical equivalent of a nuclear reactor, designed largely from information contained in scrolls found in a cave in a dangerously magical area (everyone who went there died of rare, magically induced diseases) in the form of a bowl-shaped valley surrounded by rings of mountains. When the thing begins to overload, Ponder Stibons says he thinks that the reactor at that site probably was shut down in this state, so they need to come up with a way to bleed off the magic ''fast''.
* Tolkien got tired of people viewing [[The Lord of the Rings|the One Ring]] as an allegory for nuclear weapons. He was fond of noting that if the Ring was an allegory for the Bomb, Saruman wouldn't have tried to steal but, instead would have tried to develop his own, and the Alliance would have used the Ring against Sauron.
** Although, strictly speaking, Saruman ''did'' create his own Ring, although it was never used as more than an indication of how mad he had become.
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* In ''[[Vincalis the Agitator]]'' by Holly Lisle a magical weapon capable of destroying entire cities is created. In ''[[The Secret Texts]]'' trilogy the after-effects of the prequel are visible on the world map as "wizard circles": very large, very haunted, perfectly spherical craters where the cities of old used to be.
▲== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Doctor Who]]'': The war that led to the creation of the Daleks was not fought with nuclear missiles, but in fact "Neutronic missile". Presumably this was done because it gave them more creative freedom over what they could say the weapons do/did, for example real nuclear missiles would just burn or vaporise a jungle rather then petrifying it.
* ''Series/Warehouse13'': The brick from the House of Commons is said to have contain the entire force of the London Blitz. Artie calls it out as an "Artifact Nuclear Device"
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==▼
▲* In the Czech film ''Císařův pekař - Pekařův císař'' the golem is an obvious analogy for nuclear power. (The villains attempt to use the golem to rule the world and get killed in the process, while the hero goes to use it for the good of all.)
▲== Tabletop Games ==
* ''[[Exalted]]'' has the Soulbreaker Orb, a magical device that, when triggered, simply kills anything in a five-mile radius. No actual damage is done, there is no giant fireball, everything just falls down dead. Of course, this being Exalted, it probably means that your character will [[No One Could Survive That|survive with a minor scratch.]]
** Also, the Imperial Defense Grid and some of the Solar Circle spells, such as Rain Of Doom and [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Total Annihilation]].
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*** Then there's the Eye of Judgment, a larger, less resource-efficient Godspear that kills everything within five miles or so of the target ground, mounted on a flying castle.
** Some of the Malfeas Charms for the Infernals are obviously building up to this, at least in the hands of homebrew. The "Green Sun Nimbus Flare" charm tree allows you to turn opponents into mushroom clouds and inflict magical radiation sickness on hell steroids on your enemies. Who knows how this could end up by Essence 10? There's even a Malfeas shintai charm that basically turns a significant area around you into Ground Zero except to allies and people who grovel at your feet.
* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' has a fair number of mass-damage and mass-destruction cards, usually rare. World-killing spells are often much cheaper than one would expect. For example, [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=129808 calling down God to destroy the world] costs the same amount of mana as [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=29913 summoning an antelope]. The [http://magiccards.info/aq/en/16.html Golgothian Sylex] is probably the most famous example: Urza used it to destroy Argoth, which led to nuclear winter and an ice age. However, the card only destroys Antiquities cards, which makes it nearly useless. Other classic examples are [https://web.archive.org/web/20080610185836/http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?id=233 Armageddon] (destroys all lands), [
** There are also [http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?name=Pernicious%20Deed Soul Bombs], which are powered by a sentient being's ethereal spirit, which were used by Urza and his strike team to destroy most of Phyrexia.
** And Yawgmoth's own stone chargers, which turned the [[Meaningful Name|Meghiddon Defile]] from a narrow crevice into a massive bowl carved out of a rock...and unleashed a choking white-mana fog that destroyed the nearby city of Halcyon. ([[Spanner in the Works|Yawgy wasn't actually planning that part]].)
* ''[[FATAL|F.A.T.A.L.]]'' had the titular spell F.A.T.A.L. which took a week to cast and killed all life on earth. Then again, as Sartin said, with [[Crapsack World|this game]], [[Humans Are
** Note that a F.A.T.A.L. effect can be randomly activated by simply fumbling any spell. ''Any''. It's just a matter of time before something tragic happens in a F.A.T.A.L. campaign (as always).
* ''[[Dungeons
** "Apocalypse from the Sky" spell is a legal, non-epic, destructive spell in 3rd Edition with a ''ten-mile per level'' radius centered on you (and due to fact that you have at least to be level 18 to cast the spell you can imagine the blast), and, unlike any other spell, you can't exclude yourself from it, and even if you do survive that, the [[Black Magic|corruption damage]] would probably put you in a coma.
** Any half-competent [[Munchkin]] can make up pretty good overkill using effects like [[Divide by Zero|dimensional ripple]].
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*** A variant (and less rules questionable) is to apply fell drain (negative level to anyone hurt) which turns anyone in the radius with 1 hit dice (most small animals, including vermin, count and, depending on the DM, most NPCs, qualify) into [[The Virus|wights]] which promptly kill anything left and make more wights, instead of everything after Flash Frost.
** Things like Meteor Storm might count, at least given [[Neverwinter Nights 2|Obsidian's]] interpretation of what they look like.
** [[Mystara]], according to ''The Principalities of Glantri'' (''[[Dungeons
** [[Forgotten Realms]] had a few. The most destructive single spell about which there's some lore and not just mentions is "Killing Storm" from Elven [[Too Much for Man to Handle|High Magic]]. During ancient elven wars, these blasted one kingdom so thoroughly that after 11,000 years the place remained a moor.
** In the [[Eberron]] campaign setting, the entire nation of Cyre was destroyed during the Last War by an event known as the Mourning. A thick mist covered the country and killed anyone caught in it. While the particulars of the event itself seem rather un-nukelike, the devastated Mournlands are described in a way reminiscent of an area destroyed by nukes and heavily contaminated by fallout, including a "Glass Plateau" and a rift in the ground that glows with eerie light and mutates anything that stays too close too long.
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* Divine level spells of certain paths (and even certain Ki attacks) in ''[[Anima: Beyond Fantasy]]'' qualify as this. At the ''most'' extreme cases of the former, the spells affect everything within a radius of ''1 AU (150,000,000 kilometers)''.
== [[Video Games]] ==▼
▲== Video Games ==
* The Final Flame ability of the Valkyria in ''[[Valkyria Chronicles]]''. Valkyria are bad enough. If they decide they're [[Taking You with Me]] they'll take out a city in a mushroom cloud.
* The old computer game ''[[Wizardry]]'' had the Tiltowait spell.
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* The Carronade or Hex Cannon from ''[[Breath of Fire]] IV'' is one of the more blatant examples seen of the trope. It is powered from the pain and sorrow and despair of human sacrifices who are ''tortured to the point of '''insanity''' first'' and are explicitly selected based on their connection to the target (yes, you're reading this right; it's a Fantastic Nuke that ''literally'' runs on [[Nightmare Fuel]]).
** One town depicted as being "Hex Cannoned" requires people to go in with decontamination suits for years after its Fantastic Nuking, (although the harmful to all living things magic that fills the town isn't the only problem, as the town is haunted by ghosts created when the Hex Cannon blast kills people and filled with twisted monsters changed by the hex as well) and is depicted ''explicitly'' as being uninhabitable for at least a year past that point.
** And unsurprisingly, the very thing that causes the [[God-Emperor]] of the game to decide that [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|Humans Are Bastards]] is {{spoiler|when ''the very empire he founded uses it on him''...'''WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND AS THE FANTASTIC WARHEAD'''.}} He goes [[Laughing Mad]] and proceeds to go on a [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]] against humanity as a result.
* ''[[Wild
* The Destroy All spell available to Liches in ''[[Dungeon Siege]]: Throne of Agony''. The icon is, of course, a mushroom cloud.
* Bring It On Home from ''[[Brutal Legend]]''. It summons a flaming Zepplin to crash-land and explode at your location. It's kind of a [[Wave Motion Gun]], you're vulnerable while jammin' out the long and complex spell and it has a five minute recharge.
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* One [[Expansion Pack]] for ''[[Civilization]] II'' features a scenario taking place in the world of [[Norse Mythology]]. The equivalent to the Cruise missile is a lightning bolt, and to the Nuclear bomb is a fireball.
== [[Web Comics]] ==▼
▲== Web Comics ==
* ''[[8-Bit Theater]]'' has black Mage's [[Kamehame Hadoken|HADOKEN!]] Which actually managed to take out ''an entire world'' {{spoiler|[[Throwaway Country|of lizard men]].}}
* ''[[Girl Genius]]'' has the Hive Engines, some unknown combination of [[Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke|bioengineering]], [[Steampunk|pneumatics]], and [[Clockwork Creature|clockworks]], each of which hatches into a hive queen and begins generating prodigious numbers of soldier bugs and [[Not Using the Z Word|revenant]]-[[Zombie Apocalypse|producing slaver wasps]].
** The Lion, a machine specially built to hard-shutdown Europa's most powerful ([[
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic]]'', Rainbow Dash is capable of a Sonic Rainboom, typically a combination of [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|rainbow and sonic boom]]. However, as shown in the episode "Lesson Zero", it seems that if she directs the force at the ground, rather than at generating fancy flightwork, it creates a rainbow explosion, complete with mushroom cloud.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Death in All Directions]]
[[Category:Atomic Hate]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:For Massive Damage]]
▲[[Category:Fantastic Nuke]]
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