If it is an all out war then muggles have little to no chance of winning. But the original situation was 1 vs. 1 in a fair fight.

It all depends on the starting situation. Say that both combatants are atleast 500 meters from each other. Muggle could just snipe the wizard. Wizard receives the bullet in his head without warning. Now in moderately ranged combat (the range which is good for wizards duel) it would be different. Wizards are more attuned to this kind of range and therefore have larger chances of pawning the muggle. Then there's close combat where the muggle resorts to fists. Wizard probably still tries to use his wand while muggle is already pummeling him.

 

Everyone one has been talking about muggle repelling charms and what not. But how far do those charms extend? If they only affect the immediate area, simply train muggles to report when and where they get an urge to get away from a certain place and bomb the place from the air.

On another note, I beleve in HBP Fudge and the Prime Minister of britain have a meeting. What does this say about muggle/wizard relationship?

 

I'm not going to bother quoting the OP's posts since they're so long but these are my ideas on the matter:

1) A fair fight between a wizard with a wand and a muggle with only a pistol isn't going to be fair, since the muggle only has one weapon whereas the wand has the function of multiple weapons. A muggle with a gun and grenades would be more than a match for a wizard. The same could be said about a wizard who knows about muggle weaponry (what a gun does) fighting a muggle who doesn't know anything about magic.

2) You tout the impervious charm as if it's going to make the wizard invincible. From how you've described it, it keeps all matter from passing its threshold. Wouldn't that include oxygen and co2? If the muggle is fast enough (IE trained military) to dodge the spells while keeping up a constant barrage of attacks, eventually the wizard would suffocate. If some matter does pass through, bring cyanogan chloride, sarin, mustard gas etc and the wizard would be out pretty soon.

3) Even if no matter can pass that barrier, there would still be a force exerted on it. Throw a grenade at somebody with that shield up, and the force alone colliding against the shield would incapacitate the wizard long enough for a shot to get off.

4) It'd been said before, but a nuke would definitely take out the wizard. Even if for whatever reason Newton's laws don't apply to the concussive force of the explosion, the radiation alone should be able to fry the wizard.

 

The Wizards hide from the Muggles not out of fear but 'cos they don't want to be bothered constantly. If the Muggles knew about wizards they would never get a moments peace - people always asking them for cures, love potions etc.

As for what you are saying about the impervious charm:

It's physically impossible to repel any physical object in the first place, no matter how slow it may be going. It is just as impossible to stop a slow moving object as a fast one - you don't have levels of impossibility, and without magic the possibility of doing this is 0 in both cases. Therefore, something such as speed of object will have no effect upon the charm, as it has already broken all the laws of physics anyway.

It's magic; it doesn't have to follow physical laws or logic. Even if this were true, the moment the wizard felt a bit dizzy from lack of air they could just cast a bubble-head charm.

There are many spells that are invisible that can stop the wizard being able to dodge, or move at all. Example: Petrificus Totalus. Even if they were able to dodge this one, there is the immobulus; which has a wide area effect.

OK, now I'm going to tackle nukes. There are several problems in saying that muggles would win because they have nukes.

1. They wouldn't have them for long, magical people would steal them.
2. The people who would give the command to use the bomb will be under the imperious and so never give the command.
3. We have said that the bombs would not go off in highly magical areas. There are only four places in Magical Britain that the Muggles would even want to bomb: Hogwarts, the Ministry, Azkaban, Diagon Alley. All of these are highly magical places where the bombs would not work.
4. The Muggles wouldn't even be able to find these places, considering the Muggle repelling charms etc.

Even if a wizard did find himself face to face with a nuke, lets take a look at the situation. There are 3 things the wizard needs to protect himself from: Heat, Concussive force, and radiation. Lets go for the easiest first.

Heat - Just use a flame freezing charm.

Concussive force - Cast the Imperturbable charm (Impervious) to stop debris getting to you. Cast either the feather-light charm on yourself (ever tried to throw a feather really hard? It just floats gently), or a momentum arrestment charm.

Radiation - This is only really a problem if the wizard hangs around and doesn't just apperate right out of there, but even in the event of a wizard getting radiation poisoning, there are several protections. Firstly, a wizard may not even be able to get radiation poisoning. After all, they don't get cancer. Secondly, even if a wizard were able to get radiation poisoning, it will be able to be cured with magic.

So that's all 3 powers of the nuke taken away.

 

Taure, I'm just gonna mention that for some reason you never pointed out that certain shields only can do so much. After all, you don't see a werewolf in human form just casting the impervious on themselves to remove the threat of a silver weapon. And if the impervious can beat off things moving at high powers, duelling wizards wouldn't even bother banishing things at each other.

Its probably the same for all the defensive shielding spells as well.

 

We've never seen a werewolf attacked by a silver weapon, so for all we know they do just that. We don't even know if silver can hurt them in their human form for that matter.

1. There hasn't been a single duel in canon where wizards have tried to banish objects at each other. Maybe this is why.

2. As they are duelling wizards, and not a muggle and a wizard, they both can use magic, so they can cancel each other's Imperturbable charms using finite incantatem.

 

While I voted for the wizard, tho the winning chance is only about 50%-75%.

In a duel:
Wizards in general don't know much about muggles, this is a fact. In the PoA book, the wizards called the gun as metal wands. With this, we can assume that the wizards in general knows that it is dangerous but doesn't know how exactly how it works. Wizards might even assume that the gun fires like a wand does, brightly colored and slower than a bullet. This gives a muggle an advantage.

In warfare:
Wizards think themselves as superior against muggles, thus they assume that a muggle can't hurt them. The muggles can take advantage of this misconception and strike a preemptive strike where it hurts the most. In warfare between the two, the winner will be decided depending on which side the muggleborns choose to ally themselves. The muggleborn have the information on both worlds making them the best source of as a military intelligence, but with the leaders of the magical world being bigots against them, they will most likely side with the muggles (their parents).

 

Everyone who's been touting nukes as the be all and end all of wizard/muggle warfare seems to have forgotten something. Where do wizards stay. In and around muggles. Where are two of the major wizarding centres in the UK? In the middle of London. And quite frankly I don't think any Government, especially the current Brittish one, would get away with nuking their own capital city.

As for Hogwarts, why would anyone nuke a school? International opinion would go rock bottom, and in all likelyhood sanctions would be imposed, simply because the government nuked a place dedicated to children.

If there is one thing we have learned from the war in Iraq, its that if you have combatants in your country, living amongst your population, then nukes don't matter a toss, because you can't use them.

 

They bounced off instead of being repelled, which seems, to me anyway, to indicate that it has physical properties and with enough force can be destroyed. There have to be some limits to the imperturbable charm with regards to its use on living beings or Riddle would've cast it on the basilisk, Snape would've cast it on Harry in the first book (Thus letting him fall and allowing Slytherin to win, but keeping Harry alive) instead of the countercurse for Quirrel's spell.

There are limits to magic, even magic the most powerful wizards (Dumbledore, Voldemort, maybe Harry) can do.

Immobulus in the movie isn't canon, IIRC in the book they had to cast it on each pixie individually. Which means aiming it, instead of a wide area effect.

Assuming there was an all out war, who do you think the muggleborns would side with? Their parents or a ministry so corrupt and hateful towards them they're considered second class citizens by most of the people in charge. Same thing with the halfbloods, they'd either stay out of it completely so they wouldn't have to choose between parents or be more likely to choose to side with the muggles because of the way they've been treated. Then of course, you'd have the parents of these halfbloods siding with their children instead of with a government and people who consider them race traitors and filth. Considering how rare purebloods are, the magical forces on either side would be about equal, the muggles would have a definite advantage in terms of just magical firepower.

See above, the higher ups apparently know about magic and would presumably have their allies in the magical world protecting them. Even if they did cast it on them, the only thing required, as far as we know, to resist it is a strong will. Once realizing their leaders were incapacitated, the leaders in the Army would be more likely to be able to resist the curse.

Who said that? Simple gravity bombs would most likely work, though guidance systems of smart bombs and the like probably wouldn't. They would still be able to be detonated (especially if doing it above ground level) you just wouldn't be able to use the guidance systems.

Simple enough to fix:

Or just have your magic allies tell you where they are.

A nuke is going to be as slow as the fire in a witch burning. We don't even know if there's a limit to what the flame freezing charm could do if there was some way to block the instantaneous effects of the heat. A normal red fire reaches about a thousand degrees MAX. A nuclear explosion is in the tens of millions of degrees.

Again, we don't know the limits of the imperturbable charm. The only thing we've seen it work on are dung bombs and the extendable ears. Nothing close to the power of a nuclear explosion.

The effects of radiation are instantaneous, especially at close range. Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who moved elsewhere still suffered the effects (birth defects, cancer etc) years after they had moved from the cities. The nuclear weapons we have nowadays are over 2,000 times more powerful. No wizard, especially considering their apparent lack of knowledge of the sciences (thinking you can fly to the moon on a broom, etc)

 

There's way too many factors for anyone here to jump to a conclusion about who's going to win in an all-out war. Even in a one on one battle, it's unclear. A lot depends on the information at the disposal of the respective combatants. If Arthur Weasley is the Ministry's expert on muggle technology, then they're going to get their asses kicked pretty badly.

Wars are won through deception. As it stands, neither side knows anything about the other. Personally, I think that a lot will depend on the ability of the respective groups to gather intelligence on one another. With this in mind, there's a number of issues that need to be addressed.

On the muggle side, how effective are satellites and video cameras in penetrating muggle repulsion wards? It seems theoretically that they should be one hundred percent effective, though canon doesn't address this question at all. How decentralized is the military chain of command? Using targeted imperius strikes against leaders will require information on the locations and identities of those military leaders. Again, this information will be concealed. It will take time to implement such a program.

On the flip side, muggles have a long way to go before they're in a position to take down wizards. They're going to have to replace all their electrical detonators with mechanical or chemical ones, which are not nearly as precise. They're also going to have to develop checks and balances and informational lacunas amongst their elite to minimize damage from legilimancy and the imperius and the cruciatus. Don't forget that, even if the imperius fails, good old fashioned torture would probably work to extract information. Muggles should probably also develop mobile command centers to heighten security. The best defense against a wizard is to run and hide, which isn't that difficult. There's a lot of real estate in the muggle world.

Don't forget though that wars are dynamic. There's no reason to think that, in a protracted war, muggles won't be able to develop anti-wizarding strategies. Consider that, with a number of magical specimens, they might be able to create magic-targeted biogenic agents. Also, we know that magic and electricity impact one another. Muggles may develop an understanding of that relationship and use it to their advantage. They may be able to employ high concentrations of EMR to disrupt magical activity. Muggles are masters of the scientific method. We have little evidence that Hogwarts teaches wizards and witches how to create propositions, test them, draw inferences, analyze, control variables, etc. This makes me doubt their ability to develop effective counter-measures, given that their data collection and processing infrastructure is so rudimentary.

Magic has several valuable uses in warfare, but I'm not confident that the wizarding world is capable of utilizing it to the potential necessary to actually defeat muggles. Again, I think a lot depends on who decides to strike first, and how much information they can gather covertly.

 

Wizards.

I mean...come on...a male wizard can grow a baby in his rectal passage! That's freakin' awesome!

Then, he could shit that fecesbaby out and chuck it at the muggle!

What would a muggle do when he's hit in the face by a shit covered baby?

:::

But I digress.

A skilled wizard could easily cast a head exploding spell and kill a muggle.

 

No, I am quite sure that they were repelled: Ginny threw them a the door and they glided away.

There are limits to magic indeed; this doesn't change the fact that magic doesn't have to be logical.

Incorrect, in the books they hit the pixies with books to take them out. Immobulus is a purely movie-canon spell, but as we have been told that JKR came up with most of the spells for the movies, it is just as valid as those from the books.

I think they'd side with the people that aren't trying to kill them myself. Humans have a funny self-preservation instinct.

But since freezing flames is impossible anyway, all the rules of physics have been broken already. You can't have levels of impossibility - it would be impossible to freeze flames at 100 degrees, so freezing them at tens of millions is no harder.

And again, if the imperturbable can do the impossible already, then it is no harder to stop an object coming at you at the speed of light than it is to stop one at 2 mph.

You are infected immediately, but magical people have cures for Muggle ailments; it is just magical maladies they have trouble with.

Oh? And why can't you fly to the moon on a broom?

As far as I can see there are few problems:

1. Getting out of the atmosphere - the broom doesn't run out of fuel, so this isn't a problem.
2. Oxygen - Solved by a bubble head charm.
3. The Cold - solved by a warming charm.
4. Lack of air pressure in a vacuum - solved by a shield.
5. Burning up on re-entry - solved by a flame freezing charm.

So there you go, its easy for a wizard to go to the moon.

 

Every time I see a post of yours I think of Emerson from Mugglenet defending HBP and I want to punch a baby in the face. Just had to get that out there.

 

The books are set within our world. Unless something is proven canonically to be beyond our laws, then our laws apply.

Wrong, the games' spells were mostly created by JKR. The movies were created by the scriptwriters, at least according to HPL

Those from the films, however, were probably created by the scriptwriter, Steve Kloves. Many of them don't really fit the established system of magic that we find in the books.

If it's a war started by the higher ups, as is usually the case, the muggleborns and halfbloods would overwhelmingly join the Muggle side. I'd side with a government who doesn't care about my heritage rather than one who would want to kill my family, siblings, and children.

The flame-freezing charm's name is a misnomer, since they didn't actually freeze the flame as the muggles would notice that and would resort to other tactics. They most likely cast a cooling charm on themselves to give themselves the feeling of a cool breeze.

The speed is harder, a slowburning flame versus the instantaneous effects of a nuclear explosion.

It's not doing the impossible, we just don't know how it works. There are technologies in development to create real "force fields" a la Star Trek, plasma windows, etc.

At a close range, IE a direct or close to direct hit from a 50 megaton bomb, you'd be vaporized.

They also have problems with muggle maladies such as: Harry and Dumbledore's eyes, the Longbottoms' insanity, Moody's disfigurements (though that may be by choice), Bill's scars, etc.

Escape velocity of Earth is 11.2km/second. No broom would be able to match that. The fastest Broom we know of is the Firebolt, which 240km/hour, or .06 km/second.

Even if you did somehow escape the atomsphere, the moon is 238,854 miles away. Considering how rare and expensive it is, even Malfoy doesn't have one, it's unlikely the wizard claiming to travel to the moon had one. The Nimbus 1000 can travel at approx 100 miles per hour, while Ron's new broom (Cleansweep 11) can go at 70 miles per hour. I'll assume he was travelling at 120mph (Just a guess on the Nimbus 2000, it's likely faster than the Nimbus 1000 but must be slower than the Firebolt). At 120 mph it would take him 1990.45 hours, or 83 days for one trip. 166 days for a round trip is about 5 and a half months. 5 and a half months without water, food, etc and the longest we've heard of a bubble head charm working was an hour during the Triwizard Tournament. It's impossible.

 

I'm going to side with David9 here about Wizards going to the moon.

Currently, it would be impossible for them. But, if they were to work on going to the moon (Why would they even want to?) they probably could find a way with pure magic. If they can control minds, trap souls in objects, and turn a monkey into a banana, it shouldn't be too hard to create a bubble head charm that can last days on end. That, with some kind of CO2 - O2 transfiguration charm, an endless pouch of food, a comfortable vessel with the flying abilties of a broom that can go much faster, and an endless canteen of water.

Yes, it's definitely possible.

A wizard cannot survive your average nuke blast either. Considering the power of today's tactical warheads, no wizard shield could stand up against the massive output of radiation, heat, and shockwaves that result outside of the instantly incinerated ground zero.

That's too limiting. It's like saying just because you don't see something it doesn't exist.

Funny. That seems to contradict everything we've seen in history. Besides the fact that the Ministry of Magic isn't killing any of its citizens, there's the concept of patriotism and self-preservation (Like Taure said). It doesn't matter where you're from - you might abhor the war, but you're sure as hell going to fight the other side when they want to hunt you. Why would Muggles even accept wizards on their side? We're talking about a war between Wizards and Muggles, not some political event where people can cross sides because they believe in the other's ideas. This is a war where one race wants to kill the other. You're going to have half-bloods and muggleborns that will want to protect their muggle friends and families, but they will not participate in the genocide of their own race.

On a small level, wizards would defeat muggles. On full scale war, wizards wouldn't stand a chance. The sheer number of muggles is beyond what any number of spells can defeat. It would be easier if every wizard knew the unforgivables and a vast a battle spells, but they don't - most are shown to be a educated in the degree that living normally requires - household charms and the like.

The British Army would slaughter them. And then you have mass hysteria on the part of muggles. You know what happens when hysteria grips a population. There is no reason.

Nice doublepost. And your insult...it hurts so much.




Here's a fruit for your labor (childish, ignorant, and totally assuming as this is probably the fourth time we've ever posted in the same thread):

 

It is canon that magic is not logical.

I do believe that JKR has said in an interview that she made up some spells for the films. As for them not fitting in with the established magic system; they quite obviously do. Name one spell from the films that contradicts the book's portrayal of magic.

You're taking the extreme fanon view that Muggleborns and half bloods are prejudiced against in the Wizarding world. In canon, it is in fact just a handful of people, like the Malfoys, who think this - in general there are equal opportunities for all, so half-bloods would be just as willing as any pureblood to fight for their world.

Joining the Muggle's is not a choice for anyone with magic: the muggles would kill them (or at least try to).

That is completely wrong and you've just made it up. A flame freezing charm is called thus because it negates the damaging effects that fire has.

Yes, but it's still impossible to stop an object in midair without the aid of any technologies, which is what the Impervious does.

Not if you've got a flame freezing charm on you wouldn't.

Eyes is a plot device.

Longbottoms insanity has a magical, not mundane, cause.

Moody has a replacement eye. The woulds are curse wounds - magic in nature.

Bill's scars - again, magical in nature, not muggle.

As for the moon thing: water and food can be conjured: we've seen Dumbledore do it. Escape velocity may be a problem, but I'm sure it could be solved by either manipulating time, thereby increasing your speed per unit of time, or changing your escape angle, or something like that.

 

What About the magical creatures ? Dementors for example ? Muggles cant see them ;] 300 Dementors could whipe out thousands of muggles , whey would be incapacitated out of fear and the dementors whould just give them a little kiss ;]

 

And no Muggle weapon could hurt the Dementors: they can be repelled only by the partonus.

 

Thats what i meant ;] thats why the wizards would win