Tiny Bombs

Another thought that came to me after reviewing the Historical: Reunification War WMD rules was to look at how the Word's first attempt at containing the outbreak would've played out from a game mechanics point of view.

The mission the Word's commanders would be attempt to fulfill would be to destroy every living creature within about 2 km.  The Word would have on its side the advantage that everything would be soft targets; nothing military-grade to resist its weapons.  So what would the astute Word of Blake commander choose to accomplish this mission?

Now, H:RW gives us five classes of nuclear ordnance to play with: Type Ia, Type Ib, Type II, Type III, and Type IV.  The blast radii of Type II is 1.3km, while the blast radius of Type III is about 2.7km.  For our purposes, nothing within these areas will survive the blast; hardened vehicles stand a chance, but this is a sleepy mountain hamlet.  Everyone within twice that range has a 41.7% chance of being killed outright by the secondary effects.

Let's presume for the moment that the Word commander was more concerned with containment than subtlety; he has the Type III 50-kiloton bomb dropped on the town.  The entire valley is wiped out.  The airburst leaves no crater, but it is clear that a horrible explosion has occurred here.  What are they going to tell everybody?

Now, a 5-kiloton blast could conceivably be covered up  as an industrial accident; such explosions have occurred before in our time.  50 kilotons, however, either means natural disaster a la Tunguska, or a weapon of mass destruction.  ROM's immediate spin on this would be to pin the explosion on a group of Terran Resistance members.  I suppose a fabricated message taking credit for the incident could easily be created, whipping popular opinion against the Resistance.

The practical upshot is that it is reasonable to assume that Word force on Terra had access to these weapons, and deployed them to stop a Class V bioweapons outbreak on the Homeworld, and now I have better information to describe the scene as the characters find it.