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I'm writing a story set in a futuristic, but post-apocalyptic Earth wherein most of the Earth has been rendered a barren wasteland and humanity, as per the genre, struggles to survive at all.
What I'm not sure of is how to get there. I don't know enough about high-energy/theoretical weapons to decide exactly how this could happen, so hopefully someone here can help me out! I've tried to do a little research but not found satisfactory answers, so bear with me if I get something totally wrong here.
I was initially thinking of antimatter bombs, but the scant research I've done suggests to me that antimatter bombs would be quite "clean" relative to fission bombs, emitting only gamma radiation and lots of heat? If this is accurate, would it be feasible that the right amount of antimatter bombs were detonated around population centers and such that they generated enough heat to drastically alter the Earth's climate? If so, would that kind of heat increase last for a significant period? Say, a few hundred years? If this is believable it would serve my purposes perfectly.
I suppose I could always just go with nuclear winter, but I don't want to fall into the standard radiation tropes and more clean, devastating explosions that set up the world the way I'm picturing would be very convenient. Technology or the difficulty of creating these weapons is irrelevant because they will be deployed by 'sufficiently advanced aliens'. That said, if there's any other wacky theoretical weapons technology stuff that I could use for this effect, that'd be great too.
For anyone who read this whole thing, thank you! For anyone who has an answer, thanks even more!
What I'm not sure of is how to get there. I don't know enough about high-energy/theoretical weapons to decide exactly how this could happen, so hopefully someone here can help me out! I've tried to do a little research but not found satisfactory answers, so bear with me if I get something totally wrong here.
I was initially thinking of antimatter bombs, but the scant research I've done suggests to me that antimatter bombs would be quite "clean" relative to fission bombs, emitting only gamma radiation and lots of heat? If this is accurate, would it be feasible that the right amount of antimatter bombs were detonated around population centers and such that they generated enough heat to drastically alter the Earth's climate? If so, would that kind of heat increase last for a significant period? Say, a few hundred years? If this is believable it would serve my purposes perfectly.
I suppose I could always just go with nuclear winter, but I don't want to fall into the standard radiation tropes and more clean, devastating explosions that set up the world the way I'm picturing would be very convenient. Technology or the difficulty of creating these weapons is irrelevant because they will be deployed by 'sufficiently advanced aliens'. That said, if there's any other wacky theoretical weapons technology stuff that I could use for this effect, that'd be great too.
For anyone who read this whole thing, thank you! For anyone who has an answer, thanks even more!