The earliest known purpose-built weapons in human history date to the Bronze Age. Maces, which were little more than rocks mounted on sticks, had questionable value as hunting tools, but they were superbly suited for smashing the bones and skulls of other humans. Later in the Bronze Age, the sword made its first appearance. Since that time, weapons have been refined to maximize the killing potential of the wielder while minimizing the ability of one’s opponent to retaliate. Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend is the armed drone, an unmanned aerial vehicle that can loiter at high altitude for hours before firing a missile at its target. In such cases, the drone operator might be on the other side of the world, and the act of killing appears to be as impersonal and unreal as a video game (that parallel breaks down when one examines the rates of PTSD among military drone operators, which are comparable to those of ground troops). From rocks to rockets, the weapons of war have changed over time, but a few stand out as revolutionary for their killing power.
Maxim machine gun
The 19th century saw a revolution in firearms technology. Machine tools allowed for greater precision in gunsmithing. Misfires became less common with the introduction of the percussion cap and cartridge ammunition. Smokeless powder burned more cleanly and evenly than black powder, and gunsmiths were quick to realize the potential of utilizing a weapon’s recoil to increase its rate of fire. Hiram Maxim was the first inventor to incorporate all of these innovations into a single weapon. The Maxim gun, developed around 1884, was a recoil-operated, belt-fed, water-cooled machine gun that fired more than 500 rounds per minute at an effective range of more than 2,000 yards (1,830 meters).
Maxim was an outspoken and effective advocate for his weapon, and armies across Europe adopted some version of the Maxim in the years before World War I. Versions of Maxim’s gun were ubiquitous on the Western Front; when matched against outdated infantry tactics, their killing power was astonishing. In just one day of the First Battle of the Somme, more than 20,000 British soldiers were killed in bloody and ineffective charges against entrenched German defenders armed with MG 08s—the German variant of the Maxim.
Nuclear weapon
Nuclear weapons are the elephant in the room when the deadliest weapons in history are being discussed. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has provided humankind with the ability to inflict upon itself the sort of extinction-level event that was previously achievable only by straying into the path of an asteroid. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, killed 70,000 people initially, with tens of thousands more succumbing to radiation sickness over subsequent months and years.
The explosive yield of Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was equivalent to about 15 kilotons of TNT; the Russian RS-28 Sarmat (called Satan 2 by NATO) ICBM was designed to deliver a payload 2,000 times more powerful than Little Boy. Russian engineers claimed that a single Satan 2 missile could obliterate an area the size of Texas or France. Although arms limitation treaties drastically reduced the size of nuclear arsenals, there are still an estimated 15,000 nuclear weapons on Earth. More than 90 percent of those weapons belong to the United States and Russia.
Shock cavalry
Few military advances fundamentally altered European society more than the rise of shock cavalry. The ascendancy of the mounted knight was the result of an accumulation of technological innovations over hundreds of years.
The war saddle had been introduced by the 6th century, and the iron stirrup (often mistakenly credited as the single invention that enabled heavy mounted warfare) was common by the 7th. The curb bit, necessary for controlling a warhorse, probably dates from about the same time. Iron horseshoes date from the end of the 9th century, and spurs had begun to appear in the 11th. By the 12th century these factors had combined with increases in the size and power of warhorses and steady improvements in personal armor to place the mounted knight at the apex of the European battlefield. Feudalism evolved symbiotically with the mounted knight, and the socioeconomic and military systems enabled each other. For centuries, the armored knight was unchallenged. The adoption of the pike by Swiss footmen and the introduction of the Welsh longbow shifted the paradigm, however. At Morgarten (November 15, 1315), Swiss eidgenossen (“oath brothers”) routed a force of Austrian knights, and at Poitiers (September 19, 1356) and Agincourt (October 25, 1415), skilled English yeoman archers decimated the flower of French knighthood. Infantry drawn from lower social classes had permanently eclipsed highborn armored cavalry.
Greek fire/napalm
Stand-up legend George Carlin distilled the concept of the flame thrower in this way: “Gee, I sure would like to set those people on fire over there. But I’m way too far away to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame on them.”
The first people to effectively weaponize Carlin’s chain of thought were the Byzantine Greeks, who created a composition known to history as Greek fire. The composition of Greek fire was such a closely guarded secret that its exact formula remains unknown, but its effectiveness in combat likely prolonged the life of the Byzantine Empire. A modern version of Greek fire, napalm, first saw use during World War II. Incendiary bombs containing napalm were among the ordnance used in the Allied bombing of Dresden (February 13–15, 1945) and the firebombing of Tokyo (March 9–10, 1945). The former killed at least 25,000 people and destroyed one of Europe’s great cultural centers, while the latter killed at least 100,000 civilians (a total that exceeded the initial death toll of Hiroshima) and razed half of the Japanese capital. Critics deemed these attacks to be war crimes, but Allied planners defended them as essential to the overall war effort.
Rifle
Until the 19th century, shoulder-fired infantry weapons were typically muzzle-loaded smoothbore muskets. These muskets could propel bone-shattering .75-caliber (19-mm) rounds up to 200 yards, but they did so with little accuracy. In order to be quickly rammed from muzzle to breech, musket ammunition had to fit loosely in the barrel. When discharged, the musket ball wobbled down the barrel, contributing to erratic flight after it left the muzzle.
Early attempts at rifling—cutting shallow spiral grooves into a firearm’s barrel—were unsuccessful because lead ball ammunition had to be forcibly rammed into the rifled bore. Rifles were significantly more accurate than smoothbore weapons because the spiral grooves imparted spin on the projectile. This problem was initially solved by French army officer Claude-Étienne Minié. Minié designed a conical bullet, subsequently known as the Minié ball, with a base that expanded into the musket’s rifling when the weapon was fired. This innovation dramatically improved the range and accuracy of rifled muskets without reducing loading time. The staggering losses associated with the battles of the American Civil War were due in part to the failure of commanders to recognize the increased lethality of the weapons carried by their men. Design innovations such as breech-loading weapons, smokeless powder, and cartridge ammunition made rifles even deadlier. The adoption of rifled bores in field artillery pieces greatly increased the range, accuracy, and lethality of big guns. The development of the assault rifle during World War II transformed infantry combat as volume of fire and rapid maneuver by small units eclipsed precision marksmanship as a measure of effectiveness (an evolution that, ironically, minimized the accuracy issues that rifling was supposed to address). The AK-47 assault rifle is perhaps the defining piece of military hardware of the 20th century. Countless guerrilla, militant, and revolutionary movements adopted the weapon, and it was estimated that there were as many as 100 million AK-47s in circulation in the early 21st century.
Submarine
Early submarines were far more lethal to their own crews than they were to their intended targets. The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank repeatedly before its successful spar torpedoing the Union sloop Housatonic. Even this “success” must be qualified, however, as the attack resulted in the Hunley’s sinking (again) with the loss of all hands.
By the late 19th century, advances in gasoline engines and electric motors had addressed the issue of propelling the boat above and below the water, and design improvements had greatly bolstered the seaworthiness of the craft. By World War I, all major naval powers were employing submarines in their fleets, but German U-boats would unquestionably have an outsize influence on the war’s outcome. U-boats sank more than 10 million tons of Allied shipping, and Germany’s practice of unrestricted submarine warfare—most notably the sinking of the British liner Lusitania—contributed to American entry into the war. U-boats assumed much the same role during World War II, when they very nearly severed Britain’s vital lifeline with the United States. While some modern submarines are built to function in an antiship capacity, the destructive power of attack submarines pales when compared with ballistic missile subs. The U.S. Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine was equipped to carry up to 24 Trident missiles (although this number was reduced by treaty), each missile MIRVed to deliver as many as 10 nuclear warheads, and each of those individual warheads was designed to generate a 475-kiloton blast. These ships were essentially “World War II in a can,” capable of delivering the equivalent of nearly 8,000 Hiroshima explosions from nearly 1,400 miles (2,250 km) away.
Biological weapons
In the history of armed conflict, disease has often claimed more lives than combat. Intentionally introducing infectious agents to the battlefield is a dubious strategy at best, however, as biological weapons tend to be even more capricious than chemical weapons. Viruses and bacteria do not discriminate on the basis of uniform, insignia, or allegiance. Beginning in 1346, Genoese defenders at Kaffa (now Feodosiya, Ukraine) withstood a Mongol siege that lasted for more than a year. When disease began to ravage the besieging forces, the Mongols responded by catapulting plague-ridden corpses over the city walls. Fleeing the epidemic that soon took root in the city, the Genoese inadvertently carried the plague to Europe; between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death claimed 25 million lives. Biological weapons were banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, but Japan used biological weapons in China and conducted an extensive experimentation program that killed more than 3,000 human test subjects. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was intended to limit the development and stockpiling of biological agents, but it was revealed that the Soviet Union had engaged in a massive clandestine biological weapons program from the day it signed the treaty in 1972. Without an invasive inspection and enforcement system, the BWC acted more as a statement of global norms regarding weapons of war than as an actual prohibition of biological agents.
