Suitcase Nuke

“None of us ever wanted to use that nuke. We never thought we would. It felt like a toy. We kept laughing that it came with a manual."

The suitcase nuke is a nuclear weapon that John acquires from an undisclosed foreign nation in exchange for his necromantic services. John goes on to use the suitcase nuke as leverage against his rival, the FTL project.

Acquisition

After losing funding for his cryo project to save the planet Earth, John develops supernatural powers which allow him to preserve and reanimate corpses. Fearing a government cover-up, John goes public with his powers. After gaining popularity online, John and his team are approached by a mysterious entity which was willing to pay an exorbitant amount of money for John to reanimate the corpse of their leader and puppet him around in the guise of being alive.

After agreeing to the project, John is given access to the corpse, at which point he realizes that he’s agreed to reanimate the leader of an entire nation. With this additional information and the necessity of John’s continued participation in actively puppeting the dead leader, John, M—, and A— reopen negotiations with the leader’s handlers. Using the strategy of Bad Cop, Worse Cop, and Sorry Cop, they haggle the price until eventually settling on “a couple billion dollars and a suitcase nuke.”

G—, John’s engineer, ensures that the nuke cannot be armed, manages its transfer to the cryo lab, then locks it in a safe under the flooring.

Use

Without the intention of actually using his newly-acquired nuke, John leverages his possession of a weapon of mass destruction to be considered more seriously in the international political sphere. He is, however, dismissed by his former backers, who have put their money behind Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel. John grows increasingly suspicious of the FTL plan and becomes obsessed with proving that it’s not a tenable plan. After discovering proof that the FTL project only had capacity for the richest of people, John pressures the nation whose leader he is puppeting to prevent the FTL ships from launching. They agree on the condition that John returns the nuke.

After devising a plan with A—, M—, and G—, John sends G— to carry the nuke to neutral territory in Melbourne. Once G— arrives, John informs their collaborators that the nuke is armed and G— is a dead-man’s switch. Simultaneously, John positions his puppet to fire his country’s nuclear arsenal. He threatens his contacts with nuclear war if they don’t close the orbital gates and prevent the launch of the FTL ships. John’s contacts refuse to do anything until the nuke is disarmed, and instead begin evacuating the city around G—, allowing the FTL ships to launch. After a violent firefight at the cryo lab leaves all of his friends dead, John uses necromancy to remotely stop G—’s heart, triggering the suitcase nuke and worldwide nuclear war.