Mfcttrf

The setting:

• Present day. The country is up to you. Whatever would be easiest.

The guy:

• Highly skilled. Maybe ex-Marine? Special forces? You can have him be "top of his class" at just about anything, but not a genius or a superhuman.


• Has a death wish, but like, for everyone. He knows that he won't come out of this alive, and he doesn't care. He just wants the whole world to burn. Total human extinction if possible.

The duplicator:

• Shaped like a gateway large enough for a car.


• Only works once. Once you hit the button, it stays on, producing the exact same thing over and over, with no option to change what it makes.


• To activate, fill up a car with whatever supplies you want duplicated (i.e. a car containing you, your savings in cash, provisions, C4, guns, and ammunition), then hit the button. From that point on, an endless line of cars driven by clones of you drives out of the gateway at a rate of about 5 per minute.


• All duplicates are created at once, so the duplicate who drives out 4 hours after you hit the button has been driving for 4 hours (they come out of parallel universes; I don't want to get into it). They can refuel and replenish their food supplies in the other universes, so don't worry about that, but their need to sleep might impose time constraints.


• Can be placed anywhere (the limiting factor is where to park all the identical cars). Can't be moved after the button's been pressed.

The question:

• Can this guy and his duplicated army get past a country's defenses and launch their entire nuclear arsenal?

The way I see it, he has a well-coordinated, well-equipped, and talented army that can assemble innocuously in a matter of hours or days, so it seems plausible that he could overpower them before reinforcements arrive. Then again, he doesn't have nuclear codes or any clear way to get them. Does he stand a chance? Are nukes even his best option?

Make your own, Sorcerers Apprentice style

Pickup truck, guns, ammo, food, radiation suit, 10 7kg Uranium bricks.(Federal government allows you to get 7kg at a time and possess no more than 70 in a calendar year reputable sources may do sales checks and block your shenanigans)

Set this up outside a flooded quarry. Set up pumps to drain the quarry.

As clones come out with their uranium they pile stack it neatly and take up guard duty. Within a few hours the stack will be big enough that the clones will get radiation poisoning while stacking so shut off the pumps and dump bricks over the side. As the water starts to fill the quarry again the reaction speeds up.

Once it really gets going huge radioactive clouds will start circling the planet. It will make Chernobyl look like a wet fart. The only thing that could be done to stop it would be to nuke the pile itself, which would be worse in the short term, but perhaps the surface would be colonizable by mole people in 1000 years instead of 10000.

Flood of clones a democratic country with nuclear weapons. Make sure each clone gets to be registered as an elector.

Candidate the master as president (or prime minister), and have the clones vote for him. Sure victory.

Once he is in the war room with access to the nuclear suitcase, let him fire it with no mercy. Wait for retaliation.

Potentially yes, but it needs more of the knowledge and less of an army.

Nuclear weapons have several layers of protection. It is not enough to capture a nuke to be able to detonate it, and not enough to capture an entire nuclear facility to launch a missile. Intruders need to know exactly how to circumvent all security to succeed with their plan. An army of marines can potentially overrun a major military base, but still not able to launch a single missile.

So I think this has to be a specialist who worked with nuclear security rather than plain vanilla marine. He'd better to infiltrate the facility in "Mission Impossible"-style operation rather than try to engage in an all-out war.

To trigger a nuclear apocalypse, the guy doesn't need to trigger all the nukes himself. Triggering a few to exploit existing fault lines is enough to watch everyone destroy themselves. For example - India Pakistan, India China, US China, US North Korea, US Russia, Israel Iran (rumored to be working on nukes).

At the rate of 5 per minute, duplicator can produce 7200 clones per day. However, things like credit card, identity card etc tie into an external database (of banks, govt), so they won't work. So, your guy needs to go old school, with cash etc :P.

Since he can have the right knowledge, he can be someone who already knows how to compromise a nuke carrying submarine with the right number of clones. This is possible if he knows schedule etc of the sub's stops, and knows enough to operate and flee away with it, and launch the nukes.

This way, he is armed, and mobile.

Once done, all that is needed is to trigger nuclear strikes on individual cities, and watch the world destroy itself.

Of course, the best place for a duplicator in such a case will be some hidden location within the sub itself.

However, if you want the guy to physically grab all the nukes and trigger them, that would be a difficult task - there are supposedly 8 nuclear armed countries, with over 16000+ warheads as per wikipedia. even if these are stored 10 per location, you would have 1600 really strongly defended locations, busting which will be an impossible feat given the constraints involved (intelligence, logistics, coordination, etc)