Stone burner
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A stone burner is an fictional atomic weapon in the Dune fictional universe, the explosion and radiation of which could be precisely adjusted. It had two major uses to it: If it was of sufficient power, it would burn its way into and through the core of the planet, destroying it. Otherwise, the "J-Rays" produced would blind all within a certain radius of it.
Atomic weapons in the Dune series of stories were almost never used against humans, as that violated the Great Convention. Yet a number of Great Houses as well as the Imperial House kept them as weapons/bluffs of last resort in their wars, mostly as political bargaining chips allowing a defeated House to flee into a safe exile.
Actual use of these weapons against humans was considered a terrible crime, often subjecting the offending State, House, or user to total extermination.
It was hinted in the Dune Encyclopedia that atomic weapons were invented in the remote human past, perhaps 30,000 years before the term "stone burner" was first commonly used. Their first recorded use was on Earth by a legendary state called the House of Washington. The House of Washington is known to have invented a kind of primitive stone burner called a neutron bomb that prevented battlefields from being totally destroyed by atomic weapons. It emitted a neutron shower and a very minimal explosion, thus in theory preserving cities and buildings while killing off an opposing army.
It is also related in the Dune books that humans kept atomic weapons because they feared that an alien civilization might someday be found. Similar themes of a mysterious "great enemy" are hinted at in the Dune series; primarily in Chapterhouse Dune, in which Duncan Idaho strives against an unseen, unmovable "empire" which repulsed the Honored Matres and sought to manipulate him; the "great enemy" is briefly glimpsed towards the end, and their thoughts indicate it to be an advanced empire run by the improved Face Dancers hypothesized throughout Chapterhouse Dune. It has also been speculated that the great enemy may have been rather of robotic origin, such as intelligent computers, because in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's prequel novel, Dune: The Battle of Corrin, the AI Omnius dispatches a number of colonizing robots.
Atomic weapons were used twice on the surface of Dune in the time of Paul Atreides, the Mentat Emperor. Paul Atreides used one such bomb to blast a pass through a wild desert range called the Shield Wall. Later in his reign, a stone burner was used in an attempt to kill him. He survived but was "blinded" for the rest of his life.
