How you deal with a rampaging five-hundred-foot monster in a crowded urban area? Now that Cloverfield has opened in the UK, it's time for DANGER ROOM to go to the movies and consider this utterly vital question.
Back in the old days, things were fairly simple. When* King Kong *climbed the Empire State Building, he could be taken out by a squadron of Curtiss SB2C Helldivers. But since then there has been some inflation, and apes 20 – 45 meters tall (Wikipedia's estimate) are small stuff.
The giant ants in* Them! *still weren't that gigantic, and the army could deal with them using poison gas and flamethrowers. But by 1955, when a mutated *Tarantula *the size of a skyscraper turned up, the only solution was to call the Air Force. Bombing with high explosive had no effect – presumably the creature's exoskeleton was too tough. In the end napalm did the trick, setting the creature ablaze (is chitin really flammable?). It may have helped that the pilot carrying out the strike was one Clint Eastwood, then an unknown bit-part player.
Meanwhile, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was menacing New York. This was a Rhedosaurus, a type of dinosaur known only to Hollywood. The creature was driven back by the Army, who injured it using the latest in anti-tank technology, an M20 Bazooka. This turned out to be a mistake, as the Beast's blood contained a vicious prehistoric germ which causes further deaths. The only solution (apparently) was to fire a rifle grenade containing a radioactive material into the wound, to kill it without shedding any more blood. The sharpshooter chosen for the mission is Corporal Stone ("Ever use a rifle grenade?" "Pick my teeth with it") played by another unknown, a certain Lee Van Cleef.
*Cloverfield has been described as a 'reimagining' of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms *– both use Coney Island – but the monster is tougher to deal with, shrugging off all sorts of modern weaponry. The reason, as I see it, is fairly simple: the kit simply isn't designed for this sort of target.
It's difficult to make accurate assumptions about 500 foot-tall fictional monsters whose very existence violates the laws of physics. But it's liable to have skin, scales or other outer with protective blubber or equivalent covering several feet thick. This will absorb anything except apart from an armor-piercing round. Flesh, like water, can stop virtually any projectile within a few feet – that's why you need something very exotic like a supercavitating round if you want to go through a lot of it. Those supercavitating Russian APS underwater assault rifles might be handy here... but you'd need a lot of rounds to have any effect.
Anti-tank weapons probably would not do much either. Shaped-charge HEAT warheads, like the one on the movie's Javelin missile, produce a narrow armor-piercing jet with relatively minor behind-armour effect. It might be enough to set off fuel or ammunition within an armored vehicle. But against this monster, all you're giving it is a shallow stab with a hot needle: not dangerous, just very annoying.
You could try a massive explosive blast. David Axe earlier suggestedthat the 21,000 lb Massive Ordnance Air Burst/Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB) is the weapon used at the end of the film. He describes it as a "vacuum bomb" which is not quite correct: MOAB is not a fuel air weapon ("Contrary to some published claims, it most certainly is not an Ethylene-Oxide Fuel-Air Explosive" say GlobalSecurity) but has a fill of conventional H6 explosive, a mixture of RDX (Cyclotrimethylene trinitramine), TNT, and aluminum. While you might argue that it's a thermobaric weapon, the Air Force claim it is not. This is one reason why it is less powerful than the emphatically thermobaric Russian "Father Of All Bombs" tested last year.
However, any weapon relying on blast may not do the job either. Explosives cause three major types of injury to humans:
A deep sea monster will not have any of the air-filled organs possessed by humans. So the primary blast damage is likely to be minimal (maybe a swim bladder... maybe not). No blown ear-drums or collapsed lungs. Secondary damage from debris will also be negligible, unless you deliberately set up the geometry of the attack so that a nearby building is converted into shrapnel which strikes the beast. As for tertiary damage… well, a 100,000 ton monster is not going to be thrown too far.
In fact, the best you're likely to do is cause some Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, which is increasingly recognized as an effect of explosions. This might not be a good idea.
I suspect that the best bet would be a weapon capable of producing a large explosion inside the beast – a bunker-busting bomb like the BLU-122 used in the Divine Thunderbolt test or the even bigger Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which is still in the pipeline. This has the added advantage that it keep collateral damage in the neighborhood to a minimum as most of the destruction should be internal. Whether they could hit a moving target is, however, another matter.
One other category of weapons deserves mention. These are some are specifically designed to kill very large, heavily-armored targets which may be moving at speed. Unlike the Army and Air Force, the Navy has been in the business of dealing with this type of threat for a century, and the type of missile designed to home in on and destroy a warship is quite well suited to monster mashing.
In this regard, the otherwise ghastly 1998 US remake of Godzilla deserves an honorary mention: when New York is faced with a giant monster, the call for F/A-18s armed with AGM-84 Harpoon missiles. While the 488 lb warhead might seem a bit small, it should get through the skin of most city-wrecking beasts, and if you use enough of them you should get somewhere.
Then again, maybe we need something else to meet this kind of threat. Perhaps we need to bring back battleships with 16" guns – these would certainly give most monsters something to think about and should be able to save New York (apologies to the inhabitants of Denver, you're not well located for naval gunfire support -- but you're not at such high risk from mosnters anyway). Perhaps Lockheed, Boeing and Raytheon -- or our readers -- could make some suggestions?
