# Why Doesn't Sauron Build a Nuke?



## Gloranthan (Dec 6, 2022)

The answer is probably 'thematically inappropriate', but this is a question I've had while reading a lot of 'pre-history' fantastic settings which involve a precursor of Earth. Conan's Hyboria, for example. You have these interdimensional monsters who can shapeshift and create all sorts of bizarre creatures who are biologically impossible, but for some reason they're vulnerable to being stabbed, move at speeds humans can counteract, etc. My inner hard-sci fi nerd asks "why don't these dark gods create creatures made of depleted uranium who fire fully automatic Davy Crockett nuclear howitzer shells and just instantly annihilate all competition?" These are questions mythologists and pre-modern writers didn't grapple with, but now that we are aware that smashing together a few pieces of metal can annihilate a city, why wouldn't a super-intelligent super-craftsman with nigh-unlimited resources just nuke Minas Tirith and Beleriand?

Why doesn't Morgoth slam into Middle-Earth at near light speed and obliviate it? What's stopping him? He can spare a physical form or two.

Creating objects and technology which are too fast/hard/strong for humans to possibly deal with is _not hard even with human technology_. A god-like angel should be able to instantly create fusion in the air itself to torch everything for miles.

Tolkien himself had an impulse to revise Middle Earth to match astrophysics, so this isn't necessarily outside of what he would have had to answer if he'd actually gone through with it.

To an extent you can take elven technology as 'high tech' (Tolkien I believe indicated something like this), and sure, so you have a magic, super rare sword which can hurt depleted uranium monsters. But humans with iron pokers, not so much. And he should still have the offensive capability to physically annihilate biological humans, even ones like Aragorn with badass Conan physqiues.

Human beings have Apache helicopters with Hellfire missile tubes, which can be loaded with nuclear warheads they fire at fully automatic speeds. Yet Sauran's best is a scary flying lizard?


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## grendel (Dec 6, 2022)

Gloranthan said:


> Why doesn't Morgoth slam into Middle-Earth at near light speed and obliviate it? What's stopping him? He can spare a physical form or two.


A lot of interesting questions raised; for this one in particular, I don't think Morgoth ever wanted to _destroy_ Middle-Earth; he wanted to rule it. He wanted it to be his little kingdom, outside (so he thought) the influence of Eru and the other Valar.

As for the rest, my impression is that Tolkien was very much anti-technology, and certainly would not want to incorporate it into his tales... except, of course, to denigrate those who would make use of it (looking at you, Saruman!).


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## Gloranthan (Dec 6, 2022)

grendel said:


> A lot of interesting questions raised; for this one in particular, I don't think Morgoth ever wanted to _destroy_ Middle-Earth; he wanted to rule it. He wanted it to be his little kingdom, outside (so he thought) the influence of Eru and the other Valar.
> 
> As for the rest, my impression is that Tolkien was very much anti-technology, and certainly would not want to incorporate it into his tales... except, of course, to denigrate those who would make use of it (looking at you, Saruman!).


But he didn't have to utterly destroy it. Just selectively nuke everyone he didn't like.
I know the ultimate answer is 'high technology breaks fantasy, which is about humans and swords', but I've never found a satisfying in-canon explanation. After all, if Tolkien wants to denigrate technophilia, Sauron nuking everyone is a great example.

*Potential Explanations and Criticisms*
These are fueled by Shire Ale, so there are probably better ones:

There were no radioactive materials before the 4th/5th Age. This is in contradiction with Tolkien wanting to make the sun abide by physics. For one thing, nuclear forces are a fundamental force, and you can _make radioactive materials_ by bombarding materials with high energy particles. If you can make a Ring Wraith or Angband, I don't see why you cannot make a particle accelerator. I haven't done the calculations, but I can guarantee you CERN took less energy than Angband or Thangorodrim to build.
The laws of physics changed over time. This is unsatisfying, especially considering Tolkien's late-life intentions, because anything can be explained by 'the laws of reality altered at an unspecified time because God wanted them to', therefor, it can 'explain' nothing at all. There is some textual support for this, with the Earth changing from flat to round. But Tolkien seemed to regret this.
 Nuking the Heck out of humans would get the Valar in your business, and the Valar are going to ruin your day. This is more coherent, but is not much different than '2'. And why didn't Faenor nuke Angband, if this was the case? Faenor is smarter than me, Einstein and the staff of CERN put together on all the neurotropic drugs in the world, and if someone can capture the magical light in the trees (and no one else can figure out how he even did it) why can't he enginer a critical mas reaction? I could build a nuclear bomb in my garage if I had the materials and time, it would be a trash inefficeint one, but more than enough to make life terrible. Nuclear physics are not an arcane science, they're a fundamental law and only doing so within a reasonable budget and getting rare materials limits it. None of this would stop Sauron, or Faenor. This fits the text somewhat, but it's never specifically indicated.
Eru uses his infinite power to stop nuclear weapons from working until humans are the only game in town. This seems very ad hoc, and again could explain _anything, _and therefor actually explains nothing. Also, there is zero indication of this in the text.
Human sorcery could interfere with nukes. This is not discussed in the text at all. We don't know what any kind of human magic can do, though human (and non-evil) magicians apparently exist.
Sauron didn't want to start making nukes because anyone could build them if he did. But a) they'd have to figure them out, which is not easy for completely ignorant humans or; b) he could just keep it a secret, build them himself. With his power and domination it shouldn't have been hard to make nigh-thoughtless slaves do his lab work.


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## Olorgando (Dec 7, 2022)

An explanation of sorts could be the Music of the Ainur.
They took up themes that Eru propounded to them - three times.
The third time, by which time he had become decidedly not amused with Melkor, contained the themes of the Eruhini, both Elves and men - which none of the Ainur understood or tampered with.
My proposed solution: Eru never came close to including Relativity Theory or Quantum Mechanics (or Thermodynamics, or whatever) in his themes. And both the Elves, and even the Valar and Maiar, were limited to The Music (as Men, IIRC, were not?) No chance of ever getting such ideas ...

For external history, Einstein's Special Relativity E=MC squared dates from 1905. General Relativity from 1915, Quantum mechanics develops slowly from Max Planck in 1900 onwards. And the number of people who understood any of this stuff for a long time could have fit in a bus, in some cases into a taxi.
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 by Otto Hahn and his co-workers. Enrico Fermi built the first (artificial) nuclear reactor capable of a sustained _controlled_ chain reaction in 1942 (a bit of a gamble by Fermi & Co.) The Manhattan Project was ultra-secret. How could JRRT, having basically finished LoTR in 1949 (and having started writing The Sil about 35 years earlier) have incorporated any of this in his stories? Keep remembering, LoTR was completely published with RoTK 67 years ago, much of what we now speculate about in the year 2022 is irrelevant to JRRT's time of writing.


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## Gloranthan (Dec 7, 2022)

Granted Tolkien wouldn't have known to deal with the question of nukes. I was talking more about the internal world logic than what he actually wrote.
The Music of the Ainur could be an explanation. Melkor and his enemies only have a certain ambit of thought open to them.


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