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== [[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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*** 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), [https://web.archive.org/web/20190915164340/https://status.wizards.com/ Nevinyrral's Disk] (destroys everything ''except'' lands...okay, and nowadays planeswalkers), and [https://web.archive.org/web/20090115094750/http://ww2.wizards.com/
** 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]].)
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Death in All Directions]]
[[Category:Atomic Hate]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:For Massive Damage]]
▲[[Category:Fantastic Nuke]]
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