Somewhat ironically… actually using an Alcubierre drive has been theorized to…
…well, basically, when you ‘come out of warp speed’, turns out you’ve been accumulating, and energizing, a whole bunch of exotic particles and radiation along the threshold of your ‘warp bubble’…
… so when you uh, decelerate/stop fucking spacetime so hard… you spew out an immense amount of exotic particles and radiation.
You just have to come out of warp right next to your target planet, and that’d probably boil off a good portion of its atmosphere, and give everything biological on the side facing you lethal radiation poisoning.
Somewhat ironically… actually using an Alcubierre drive has been theorized to…
…well, basically, when you ‘come out of warp speed’, turns out you’ve been accumulating, and energizing, a whole bunch of exotic particles and radiation along the threshold of your ‘warp bubble’…
… so when you uh, decelerate/stop fucking spacetime so hard… you spew out an immense amount of exotic particles and radiation.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.5708
So you wouldn’t even have to nuke it from orbit.
You just have to come out of warp right next to your target planet, and that’d probably boil off a good portion of its atmosphere, and give everything biological on the side facing you lethal radiation poisoning.
There was a series on Netflix that used this. It was alright though probably got cancelled. Can’t remember the name of it.
It was called “Another Life” and it was pretty bad lol