10 Gargantuan Things Made Solely For Killing People
When it comes to inflicting mutilation and death, human beings think big.
If necessity is the mother of invention, the desire to kill and maim our sibling humans is its father. Nothing pushes science and technology further like war, especially when that technology needs to be really, really big. The regrettable parts of history are full of wild-eyed madmen claiming their superweapon will snatch victory from a devastated foe, and whatever form that superweapon is supposed to take it's almost always stupidly huge. Even crazier are the times somebody actually built one of these uberweapons, and a few of them are even in use today.
Sometimes a weapon needs to be bigger to take more punishment or increase its killing potential, but a surprising amount of the time it's the need to simply look terrifying that increases size, weight, calibre and wingspan. Often the need to just prove we can make something that big is what drives up dimensions and cost, and once we've built it, well it would seem rude not to actually use the damn thing.
Some people just seem to be compensating for something, and an alarming number of times it turns out they were the ones at the drawing board.
10. Tupolev Tu-160
The Soviet Union had a mighty need to show it could drop enormous amounts of destructive horror onto any location of its choosing. For long-range targets an intercontinental ballistic missile would do the job, but sometimes, to make extra doubly sure those people die, you need a bomber. The biggest one they ever built was the Tupolev Tu-160 in 1987 ('Blackjack' to NATO forces), designed to launch nuclear missiles in the name of the Motherland, and it was the biggest and heaviest aircraft ever flown.
This airborne nuclear base was 50 metres long, could fly at twice the speed of sound thanks to a swing-wing design and could carry twelve nuclear-armed cruise missiles in its freakishly capacious bomb bay. Rather embarrassingly Russia left a bunch of Tu-160s behind in Ukraine when the Soviet Union broke up, which Ukraine then sold back to them - a decision some say they regret today given how delicious Ukraine looks to the current Russian leadership.