I am not posting this Cafe Society because my question is not about the movies. But this may not have a “real” answer, so move it if you see fit.
My question is if a Godzilla like creature was attacking us, would we (the US military of today) be able to kill/stop it? I think we would be able to kill it. Yes, it is massive, but it is flesh and blood. Even if its hide were to have bone plates and be very thick, I have to think we would be able to pierce it and cause massive damage to the creature.
I don’t think there’s any plausible way Godzilla can stand up to a conventional air strike, let alone a nuclear weapon. I can’t imagine that bone is much stronger than concrete, and we’ve got conventional “bunker buster” bombs that can penetrate several meters of reinforced concrete. Nuclear-weapon proof bunkers are buried deep inside mountains, and Godzilla is a hell of a lot smaller than a mountain.
Any biological materials that are even vaguely plausible will be destroyed by a big enough bomb. Of course, Godzilla is physiologically impossible in plenty of other ways, so why not invoke unobtanium-plated skin?
Foam rubber and latex is more durable than you’d expect. However, if you have a flying jet pack, you may be able to defend Tiny Town. Just make sure you don’t do it in front of the Japanese investors.
What’s never addressed about Godzilla is that by definition he’s a giant RADIOACTIVE lizard. Killing him/it would mean that tons of radioactive meat and hundreds of gallons of radioactive blood would contaminate the area in which it was done. You would create an almost instant Superfund site which could cause greater damage than Godzilla might.
Also, since the physics which would allow a monster the size of Godzilla to exist might also preclude him/it from being killed by anything shy of a tactical nuclear weapon. Unless you could catch it in a relatively unpopulated area, you’d be sacrificing a city simply to get rid of him.
A lot of variables….
Might be better to try and drive him away and then dispose of him in the ocean or in the wild somewhere.
That’s just the warm-up question. Now to the question that really matters:
Could modern military technology (or modern any technology) take out Cthulhu?
(And, even if so, would the remains be such toxic waste as to totally sterilize the entire continent on which it happens?) – ETA: I see that nevadaexile envisioned the toxic waste question too.
A tower of flesh that big would be blown apart and turned to hamburger. But that’s fighting the movie’s hypothetical. A monster that large couldn’t move without magic. The movies depict Godzilla as being impervious to conventional arms. So the answer is no, we’d be hosed.
Cthulhu isn’t even made out of matter and is arguably immortal, or undead. He was hurt by a boat but the injury immediately healed. And the stars weren’t right yet. Advanced alien civilizations can’t kill the old ones, so I don’t see why we’d do any better.
If we use real-world physics, yes, we can kill him. All we’d have to do would be to wait for him to leave the water, whereupon he’d immediately die from failure to support his own weight.
If we use the physics from the movie, apparently not.
We could try to electrocute it with some kind of mega taser.
We could try to use chemical or biological weapons. If it has to breathe we could try to suffocate it by simply gassing it in an old fashioned way.
If it eats, we could try to bait it to eat a poisoned food.
We could also try to go for the eyes and blind it with say a laser guided cruise missile, or giant mirrors.
Or we could just dig a big hole and lure it in, and then pour in quicksand so it gets stuck inside.
Godzilla is like an unescorted B-29 – devastating if you’re in its attack path, but vulnerable to a small attacking force. A team of fighters could launch a direct attack on it’s exhaust port, but it’s not much bigger than a wamprat and would require a direct hit. A better plan would be to land a ragtag group of texas oil drillers onto it. They could drill deep into godzilla flesh and plant a nuclear bomb, as long as Morgan Freeman didn’t get there first.
I think that was addressed when we battled the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. What you need is a bazooka, special loads, a clear shot down the throat from a rollercoaster and Lee Van Cleef
Now, Gamera Vs a Blockhouse Buster --------- that I would pay to see.
Well, he’s been killed once as I recall. So I’m willing to assume it can happen again.
Plus, clearly other kaiju can be killed/defeated. That would include others in the godzilla movies, Cloverfield and Pacific Rim. Hell, if the idiots in PR could do it I think my kid’s girl scout troop would have a shot.
To nitpick, although the Beast was awakened by atom tests, it was not actually radioactive. It was the fact that it had a deadly disease that prevented it being blown up or burned. (It was, however, killed using radioactive isotopes.)
(I must have watched that movie 20,000 times when I was a kid.)