I’ve recently been reminded of Project Thor, the notion of dropping telephone poles of tungsten from orbit as kinetic weapons. Often, people who don’t know better declare that such things would have the power of nuclear bombs; this is only true if you assume *really* *small* nukes. Do the math, people; the equations for calculating mass from density and dimensions of a cylinder ain’t that hard, and plugging said mass into a kinetic energy equation assuming some fraction of orbital velocity ain’t that hard either.

Anyway, the thought of Thor got me thinking to the one time I can immediately recall seeing the system used in a movie:

Here, a single kinetic weapon is dropped on metropolitan London, and the entire city is utterly destroyed. The power of the weapon is ludicrous, being quite a few orders of magnitude greater than anything a reasonable Thor could do. Sigh, that’s Hollywood.

But what interested me was the comments section. There is a discussion there about whether losing London would utterly destroy Britain, or whether the nation would recover; a secondary discussion about rebuilding the city. Now, never mind the ludicrousness of the silly weapon system employed. Just assume that, somehow, London kerploded as shown here. A subterranean Tsar bomb, an asteroid impact, Harry Potter has a brain fart, a glitch in the matrix, whatever. London is utterly blendered; everyone and everything within a couple kilometers is not just reduced to rubble, but the soil and bedrock have hopped up and down. The Thames no longer has a well established riverbed; the terrain itself is randomized. The Underground is aboveground. The millions dead don’t need burying; they’re already buried.

Assuming that the effects were reasonably localized – no fallout, other explosions, sudden outbreak of thermonuclear war, monsters from the abyss spilling out of cracks int he Earth, etc. – would this utterly trash Britain? Ten million-ish dead… that’s bad news. But as several YouTube commenters point out, London is no longer an English city; most of those dead would not be English (whether you consider “English” to be ethnic, cultural or legal). London is responsible for a whole lot of the British economy, but it’s sorta the “fake” economy of financial stuff, not growing stuff or making stuff. Presumably the bulk of British government types would be included in the lost, along with the Royals; this would be as much “opportunity” as “tragedy.”

Discounting the effect of other nations moving in, either to stabilize or to take over, what would be the likely immediate outcome to wider British society? Would Scotland at last say “see ya” and bug out? Would the remaining Brits decide that now’s the time to restore Britain and eject the “grooming gangs” and their enablers? Would English ethnonationalism rise as a way to bring the people (well, most of them) together to recover, or would they sink into a morass of malaise and infighting? And would they bother trying to rebuild London? London has been trashed before… fires, plagues, the Blitz. But in those incidents, the *ground* remained for new stuff to be built atop the old stuff. But here? Big blocks of bedrock pointing skywards, a mile-wide swamp where there was once a river, a billion tons of building materials mixed almost randomly amidst boulders and gravel and dirt.