Children of the Nuke

The Children of the Nuke are nuclear weapons linked to The Nuke, a demigod whose influence can reach weapons even when it is not physically present. Their existence turns the Cube of Natho from a sealed artifact into a possible instrument of control over a sleeping arsenal. The threat is immense, but its precise scale and consequences remain uncertain: the weapons may be dormant, the seal may obstruct anyone without the proper ritual, and no one can say with confidence what their simultaneous detonation would do to the world.

Origin and connection to The Nuke

Mordiggian explains that powerful demigods of ultraviolence can be bound by contracts or trapped and sealed, though The Nuke proved harder to manage than other such forces. Yuan initially finds it difficult to understand how nuclear cultivators could exist if The Nuke had been confined within the Cube of Natho. The answer lies in the difference between a demigod’s physical presence and its ability to influence weapons: a demigod need not personally fire a weapon to affect the weapons that sustain its violent existence.

Mordiggian connects this principle to Yuan’s own death. The Gun’s influence, he points out, need not mean it personally fired the bullet that killed Yuan. In the same way, the existence of nuclear weapons empowered by The Nuke does not require the sealed demigod to be present at every weapon or to fire each one itself. Yuan recognizes the implication: the Children of the Nuke are the weapons his mentor had described as capable of wiping out cities in an instant. Mordiggian confirms the identification, presenting them as the nuclear counterpart to the Gun’s influence over firearms.

The sleeping arsenal and its scale

The weapons are not merely a vanished threat from a previous age. Mordiggian recalls a report estimating that four hundred nuclear weapons would be enough to wipe out humanity, while more than twelve thousand existed in the world before Lord Kou’s ascension. He stresses that they have not all disappeared or rusted away. Many, he suspects, remain asleep underground, where their apparent inactivity conceals the possibility of their return.

Their condition is therefore both a limit on immediate danger and a source of suspense. The weapons are described as dormant, not destroyed; the account gives no inventory of their locations, no count of how many remain, and no assurance that every one is inert. The wasteland’s history may have reduced the stockpile: Mordiggian allows that time, the seven ascensions, and continual battles could have destroyed enough bombs to keep any resulting damage localized. But he cannot establish whether that possibility is true. The surviving weapons remain a latent danger precisely because their number and condition are uncertain.

The Cube of Natho and the struggle for control

Mordiggian doubts that NATO intended to bring about a complete Nuclear Age. He suspects that the Cube of Natho was designed to bind The Nuke only partially, through something like a summoning contract. On that interpretation, whoever controls the cube might exercise limited influence over its prisoner, using that connection to neutralize hostile nuclear weapons or sabotage an enemy arsenal. This proposed function would explain why dormant weapons have not simply been triggered: the seal prevents others from setting them off without the proper ritual.

The artifact’s value is consequently not just symbolic or defensive. It may determine who can affect the nuclear stockpile and whether that influence is used to restrain weapons or turn them against rivals. Mordiggian describes the cube’s purpose as a suspicion, not a verified account of how NATO’s cultivators created the seal or what control it would actually grant. The distinction matters: the story establishes a plausible mechanism and its political stakes, while preserving uncertainty about the artifact’s full power.

Political stakes and possible consequences

The Yinyang Khan’s interest in the cube follows from that possible control. If he could command the sleeping Children of the Nuke, he could become the most powerful warlord in the Unmade World: weapons able to erase cities in an instant would devastate his enemies and compel others to obey. The cube thus sits at the junction of containment and domination. Its possessor might be able to keep dormant weapons from being used, but the same leverage could make nuclear terror the foundation of rule.

Manhattan presents the cube as capable of bringing salvation to all. Yuan, considering the endless desert, can imagine the nuclear cultivator’s conception of salvation for a broken and flawed world. That moment does not establish Manhattan’s full plan, nor does it show that the cube can deliver such a result. It sets the promise of salvation against the means implied by the Children: extraordinary destructive power and the prospect of controlling it. The gap between that promise and the possible consequences is central to the danger surrounding the weapons.

Uncertain end of the threat

When Yuan asks what would happen if all the nuclear weapons detonated together, Mordiggian refuses certainty. The Children might bathe the wasteland in searing light, leaving the strongest cultivators and spirits to inherit an irradiated grave. Life could endure and recover, or it might not. Even the possibility of localized destruction depends on an unverified judgment about how many weapons have already been lost to time and the world’s successive catastrophes.

That uncertainty prevents the Children of the Nuke from becoming a neatly measured weapon system. Their significance lies both in their destructive capacity and in the unknowns surrounding their survival, activation, and control. The sealed demigod, the potentially dormant arsenal, and the contested cube form a chain of danger: restraint may be possible, but so may a new kind of nuclear death. Mordiggian can warn that the world would become much less safe if The Nuke spread its influence; he cannot say how far the resulting devastation would reach.