Nuclear missile: terran weapon of mass destruction

The nuclear missile, commonly called the nuke, was the terran weapon of mass destruction, fired from structures, vehicles, and starships throughout the Koprulu sector. Humanity carried the knowledge of these weapons from Earth, lost it during the Long Sleep, and rebuilt it in exile, and no other piece of terran arsenal shaped the sector's politics so violently. A single order given by the Terran Confederacy in 2491 killed millions on Korhal IV and set in motion the chain of rebellions that ended Confederate rule. In the era that followed, the modern missile could no longer simply be fired at a map coordinate: it had to be guided to its destination by a ghost, a doctrine born directly from the ashes of Korhal.

Origins on Earth and rebirth in the sector#

Nuclear weapons were first developed by humans during the twentieth century on Earth, long before the colony ships ever left the Sol system. The knowledge did not survive the voyage intact. Following the Long Sleep, the castaway colonists of the Koprulu sector had to redevelop the weapons from the ground up, and by the time the great powers of the sector turned on one another, the missiles were back in service. They were deployed in anger during the Guild Wars, the sprawling conflict between the Terran Confederacy and the Kel-Morian Combine, establishing the nuke as a fixture of terran warfare a generation before the coming of the zerg and the protoss.

The burning of Korhal#

The defining atrocity of the atomic age in the Koprulu sector came in 2491. Faced with the rebellion of Korhal, the Terran Confederacy chose annihilation over negotiation and bombarded Korhal IV with one thousand Apocalypse class nuclear missiles. Life on the world was devastated and millions were killed in the strike. The gambit failed in its central purpose: the rebel leader Arcturus Mengsk was off world when the missiles fell, and he proceeded to rebuild his movement from the survivors, carrying the memory of the bombardment all the way to the throne of the Terran Dominion.

The political consequences reshaped terran nuclear doctrine. The destruction of Korhal forced the Confederates to limit themselves to tactical weapons thereafter, abandoning planet killing barrages in favor of battlefield strikes. The cataclysm cut the other way as well. It removed whatever inhibitions the remaining Korhalians had about employing their own arsenal, ensuring that the weapons that had burned their homeworld would one day be turned back on the state that launched them.

Ghost guidance and the Nukes Away simulation#

Under the tactical doctrine adopted after Korhal, battlefield targeting was provided by ghosts, the psychic covert operatives of the Ghost Program. The arrangement was a security measure as much as a tactical one: routing a missile through a ghost's guidance prevented outside tampering with the weapon's guidance systems. A cloaked operative deep in enemy territory painted the target, and the missile followed the operative's designation down.

Training for this role was formalized in an extremely lifelike holo projection simulation designated Scenario A11-X93, more commonly known among trainees as Nukes Away. The doctrine proved itself in the field even before some of its practitioners graduated. During an operation on the world of Shi, the fourth planet of its system, a rescue team was dispatched to recover four heirs of the old Confederate ruling families from a zerg infested landing zone. The operatives Aal Cistler and Okyl launched a nuclear missile which the trainee Nova Terra guided onto a zerg hatchery cluster, clearing the ground for the rescue. Ghost arsenals of the era also included man portable tactical nuke launchers, putting battlefield atomics directly in the hands of individual operatives.

Tactical warheads under the Dominion#

By 2501 the Terran Dominion had refined the weapon into something far removed from the city killers of 2491. Dominion ghosts directed much smaller Apocalypse class nuclear missiles as tactical weapons, precise enough to be spent on a single fortified position. Some battlecruisers were outfitted with ten kiloton tactical warheads, employed both for ship to ship combat and for ground bombardments from orbit.

During the Second Great War the weapon's operators diversified. Spectres, the terrazine enhanced successors to the ghosts, proved equally capable of calling down nuclear strikes; the renegade spectre Gabriel Tosh launched his missiles from hidden shadow ops facilities, while the Dominion's own operatives worked from the ghost academy. Even single war machines could carry the weapon: the prototype Odin bore a nuclear missile among its armaments.

Notable strikes across the sector#

The recorded history of the Koprulu sector is punctuated by nuclear fire. During the Battle of Antiga Prime, the Confederacy dropped a tactical nuke on one of its own retreating platoons in an attempt to kill the survivors and destroy the sensitive cargo they carried; the strike failed, and the platoon initially never knew it had been marked for death. Years later, at Deadman's Port, a Dominion ghost aiding Colonel Orlan dropped a nuclear missile at the entrance of his mercenary fortress as Raynor's Raiders and the forces of Mira Han advanced. The blast failed to deter the attackers, and Orlan surrendered.

The weapon ended conspiracies as well as sieges. When Nova Terra thwarted the plot centered on Gehenna Station, the covert Annihilators division finished the matter by hitting the station with a nuclear missile, utterly destroying it and ending the rebellion planned within. During the later Defenders of Man crisis, a Dominion mole redirected a nuke onto Nova's own position on Aiur; unknown to the traitor, she survived the strike.

Perhaps the strangest use of the weapon came after the End War, during the joint expedition to the resurgent zerg world of Gystt. When a psi emitter deployed by the Dominion fleet to draw the zerg away from the last adostra nest could not be deactivated, the fleet destroyed its own device with a nuclear missile, incinerating the zerg caught in the impact zone. From the ruin of Korhal to the defense of a world the zerg had made green, the nuclear missile remained what it had always been since Earth: the most terrible instrument the terrans possessed, and the one they never quite managed to put away.