planet-buster n.

What will the future be like? No physicists have testified to a limit to bomb size. Does this mean that maybe in ten or twenty years actual ‘planet-busters’ will be made?

Not like the planet busters; there is a defense against those, you just haven’t found it yet. But there actually was no defense whatever against their weapon.

We're going to take up a tight orbit. Out beyond us will be five transports full of I-A marines and a class IX Monitor with one planet-buster. You're calling the shots, God help you!

A simple heatgun, to the Darkovan ethical code, is as reprehensible as a super-cobalt planetbuster.

I don’t see anything to shoot. Five hundred miles; one planetbuster, or four or five thermonuclears.

But they couldn’t chance letting one of those planet-busters back into Old Sol’s backyard.

We don’t have to worry about being shot at; those planet-buster missiles are too big and slow to hit a small mobile target.

If this weren’t enough to scare any would-be criminals witless, secreted in dark asteroids throughout the galaxy were the Great Golden Ones' Planetbuster Bombs and Nova-grade lasers. These were never used, but perfectly capable of annihilating an entire solar system faster than you could say, ‘Just kidding!’

They would have seen a brief surge in the apparent magnitude as Omuta’s mercenary ships dropped fifteen antimatter planet-buster bombs on their home world.

But unlike an asteroid impact, where the energy release was purely thermal, the planet-busters each emitted the same amount of radiation as a small solar flare.

You could see it, across a quarter of a million miles, the surface of the Mare Imbrium billowing up into space, as the demonstration planet-buster went off beneath it, a quarter of the Moon’s old grey face convulsing in an instant.

Penny Royal doesn’t look likely to be escaping, so maybe it can hold off on the planet busters.