I was kinda just daydreaming a storyline while cleaning a car when i had this thought. From what i remember an emp is a thing that can temporarily (or in some cases permanently) disable electronic devices without necessary harming anything else like people. Question is, does the opposite exist?
Story stuff if you're interested, warning it's pretty long and not at all relavent to the question
I don’t know how to properly convey this storyline since it comes with a lot of other story stuff mixed with some oc characters1 with their own stories tied to them, it’s a mess of a universe that only i understand (doesn’t help that i don’t have any of it in writing).
But basically at this point of the story humanity had been at war with machines2 for a while now, and while they been on the losing side, their leaders came up with a plan to turn the tides of the war.
2 Spoilers, they were actually robots with trapped demons in them that they use as a energy source, including their weapons. Said demons were summoned using the corpses of living beings to possess, then trapped into a robot suit with an ai chip to controls them.
It was a huge battle, many were lost on both sides but it seemed like the rebellion would win this fight. As the fight went on one of the leaders from both sides came face to face; one a crystalline warrior1 who had been key in the rebellion’s fights, the other a dreadnought model, the leader of the machines that had been their nightmare.
They both fought hard, and both the fight and the ensuing battle was all but certain to go to the rebellion, but then, the dreadnought opened it’s chest plate to reveal… a bio-nuke to eradicate all biological life within the area, with a timer set for a mere 15 seconds. The warrior panicked, thoughts racing through his head; he likely could survive this from where he’s standing, he lived though worse, but the rebellion…
He looked back at his army and made a difficult choice, he lunges forward, grabs the dreadnought by the torso, and prepared to make great leap high into the sky in hopes that maybe, just maybe the rebellion could make a retreat in time.
We then cut into a far away overhead view of the facility outside, it’s quite and still for a few moments, save for a black dot that flies up before we see a huge, green explosion in the sky from where it was; Then… it cuts to black
tl:dr: thought of this question for a storyline while cleaning a car, if emp can disable robots without hruting people, could the opposite thing?
A lot of people have already mentioned neutron bombs, which are more immediate, but things like infected hoards of mosquitoes, rats, etc. would be devastating, especially for urban populations. One of the main reasons why the native peoples in the Americas and Australia didn’t put up much of a resistance against European colonialism was due to the spread of foreign diseases killing the majority of the population, and in many cases, the idea of deliberate infections has been brought up (whether this was implemented is pretty controversial and still an open question). The Black Death is another example, and aside from how many people died from it across Eurasia, the corpses of those who died from the plague were used as a weapon.
And of course, you have all the chemical and bioweapons of the 20th century developed by the Germans, the Japanese, the Americans, the Soviets, etc., all of which have been used for mass killings, warfare, and terrorism.