Suicide Weapons

A suicide weapon is a weapon that is specially designed for a suicide attack. It is typically based on explosives.

In a wider sense, a suicide weapon is any weapon used in a suicide attack, and any object used as such, for example an aircraft.

Examples:

• Suicide bombs
• Kamikaze air attacks by Japan in WWII
• Kaiten human-steered torpedo, used by Japan in WWII

It might also be argued that the doctrine of mutual assured destruction has turned nuclear weapons into suicide weapons. The idea of a Doomsday weapon took this to its logical extreme.

Today, the most common suicide weapons are antipersonnel bombs carried by a single person. Such bombs are typically used to carry out terrorist attacks (suicide bombings are less common, although not unknown, in conventional warfare). Suicide bombers strap explosives (often covered with nails, screws, or other items intended to act as fragments) to their bodies (see explosive belt) or otherwise carry them into populated areas and detonate them. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka invented and refined this method, which was adopted by (among others) Palestinian terrorist groups in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Pacific War of World War II bore witness to the Japanese Kamikaze suicide attack pilots. Late in the war, as the tide turned against Japan, Kamikaze pilots were deployed to attempt to crash their aircraft into American ships in the Pacific. The Japanese even developed specialized aircraft (the Ohka) for the tactic. (Nazi Germany also developed suicide planes (the Selbstopfer), although their designs included a feature for the pilot to escape, and it is unlikely that they ever saw combat.) A successful Kamikaze attack would both kill the plane's pilot and sink the target ship. Related tactics included the Kaiten suicide minisub, which a single Japanese pilot would steer into an American ship.

Kamikaze attacks were mimicked in the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and part of The Pentagon by flying hijacked civilian aircraft into them.