Say you’re an evil Bond villain, whose only goal is creating the maximum possible amount of death an destruction. In your skull-shaped moon base you’ve invented a device that can target and simultaneously terminate any three individuals on Earth - you only need to input their names, press enter and bam. The cause of death will be acute myocardial infarction; no poisons or any evidence to the contrary will be found in autopsies.
With the goal of chaos in mind, who do you target? I imagine the simultaneous expirations of Obama, Biden and Boehner, leaving President Leahy, would cause some chaos although democracies will bounce back from the deaths of its leaders. Perhaps terminate some one-party dictatorship heads and watch the fun unravel in the struggle to fill the power vacuum? Whadya reckon?
I disagree. If Obama has a heart attack, there won’t be world-wide chaos. Biden will take over and we’ll go on with life (well, almost all of us). We won’t nuke anyone over a heart attack.
The US has lost a leader before - no chaos.
Israel and France and all other parliamentary democracies have an easy method for replacing lost leaders as well. No chaos.
China: The leadership of China has a lot of bodies - all power is not baked into just one person, and the loss of one would not cause that much of an impact.
Iran: It would be the religious leader, not the President (who is more of a figurehead in many ways). I don’t know how deep their bench is.
North Korea: THAT would certainly stir things up.
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria: could get interesting depending on the status of the heir apparent as well.
Russia: Who stands behind Putin?
IMHO - it all comes down to who is the next in line, or will there be a fight for control.
One-offs around the world won’t do much, so you need to mess with an area already in chaos: the Middle East:
Syria plus 2 of these 3: Jordan or Iran or Saudi Arabia
I think you picked the wrong countries as all three you mentioned are stable, devolved countries with a clear system to elect leaders. Especially since these deaths will look like a medical event, there is very little reason to think things would become chaotic Obama, Putin, or Jinping died.
What you need are coutries where there is a significant state power, but where the people in charge have a fairly tenuous grasp on power, where there are no clear succession plans, and where the people would doubt the cause of death. I would think those people would be Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong Un, and (at the moment) Basher al-Assad. I’d give honorable mentions to the president of Pakistan, and whoever has the most power in the leadership of Saudi Arabia.
I mostly picked them because there is a real chance any of their deaths would be viewed as a covert assassination that could start a war, or because there is a decent chance the successor would be an even bigger scumbag.
If you really wanted to stir things up, you could announce what you were up to ahead of time. Followed with “And I will continue killing world leaders until [insert crazy demands here]”.
Both are single leaders running nuclear powers through force of will with no clear successor. After than I’d probably throw in Obama just for the ripple effect of general uncertainty.
But I wonder if there a way to increase the chaos with a synergistic hit?
How about the Pilot, co-pilot and navigator of Air force One as its making its way over DC towards National Airport with the president and as many high ranking officials as possible on board.
With echos of 9/11 and a the cause of the crash unclear I think that would cause more chaos beyond the simple deaths of the people on board.
Unlikely. Those countries wouldn’t plunge into chaos if their leader were murdered. Not a chance of a nuclear war resulting from that. You need unstable countries for this evil plan. I don’t know if North-Korea and Iran are the best pick, but they’re a vastly better choice than the USA.
I also suspect that the murder of the famous main political opponent could be a better choice than the murder of the current leader in many places.
Just looked up. In case of death, new elections are held and meanwhile the prime minister acts as president (currently Medvedev, so not exactly a massive change).
The loss of any one of these would create a power vacuum, and probably open up ethnic division and strife.
Mohammed Morsi
If he were to die in mysterious circumstances, the army would be blamed, and there would be massive protests around the country leading to armed intervention, and probably significant retaliatory action. An announcement of a heart attack would be extremely suspicious and would almost certainly be seen as a cover up.
If you want to cause chaos, cause the deaths of the top-3 people in a single country… even if they all die of a “heart attack”, the fact that they died all at the same time in the same manner will stir some shit up. Even better if they can be all in the same room or something.
So I go with the top 3 people in Israel. Ain’t no way they believe it’s natural.
By that same token, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and Prince William. Although it wouldn’t necessarily cause chaos, the next few years would be very interesting… Elton John would have to write several songs.
Echoing JohnT, while a stable democracy like the U.S. or France or Germany might not have any domestic trouble replacing a leader if they had a heart attack, having any three leaders of powerful nations die simultaneously will cause a shitstorm internationally.
Patience, young jedi, patience, timing is going to be the thing that makes the chaos ensue. Take any of the suggestions above and put them all on the same plane, or in the same city for a summit, and oops.
It seems to me that you want to not just create a power vacuum, but international conflict as well. You’d want to cause the deaths, but no suspicion should fall upon you, lest the world unite against you. If you did the president of Pakistan and the Prime minister of India simultaneously, it might look as if a third party was involved. To create maximum chaos, you want them to think the other did it. You also don’t want to make people think the US was behind it because although they wouldn’t really be able to attack us. Ideally, you’d want to make the deaths as mysterious as possible, say, after meeting with a dignitary from the rival nation. That said, I nominate the heads of Pakistan, India and North Korea.
I would say if it exists, the leader of a country with nuclear weapons or at the very least WMD where the succession is not very clear and the possibilty of a psycho taking over exists.
As for Obama, if Kennedy’s death in 1963 didn’t start WWIII then all Obama’s death would do is give us President Biden and Vice-President Clinton.
The **simultaneous **deaths of three major world leaders isn’t going to go over lightly with the masses simply because the causes of death were found to be due to a heart attack, or whatever other “natural cause” you want to substitute. Even a single death of a prominent individual tends to stir up quite a bit of unwarranted conspiracy chatter. But THREE? And all from the leaders of major countries?
I don’t think there’s any way to not make them look incredibly suspicious. Heart attacks? Sucking chest wounds? It’s neither here nor there. Especially if they all died in their respective countries. Such a scenario would require a pretty vast global conspiracy comprised of competent, well connected participants that know what the hell they’re doing. The aforementioned would probably be worse than them all expiring around a giant table during some meeting or summit due to the implications.
You can’t just look at the death of a single past president, prime minister, king, dictator, what have you, and try to extrapolate directly. The scenario proposed in the OP is entirely without precedent.
