I remember about the President Nixion time a lot of talk of a nuclear bomb that would only kill people,with almost no damage to structures,then radiation would decrease to nothing. this would allow soldiers to reenter and hold the blast area-- Theory or fact?
**Swiss manufacture it,French hoard it,Italians squander it,
Americans say it’s money Hindus say it does not exist,
You know what I say-I say time is a crook–
peter lorre 1954 **
They were definitely tested and built- there were 3 models- one for the Sprint ABM, one for 8" artillery shells, and one for the Lance theater ballistic missile.
Your description is a little misleading- the “almost no damage to structures” part is relative to a more conventional nuke with the same kill radius vs. tanks.
Which means that most ER warheads (“neutron bombs”) were 1-2 kilotons, but had the same kill radius as a much larger weapon (10 kt?).
So yeah, detonating the equivalent of 1000 tons of TNT is less destructive than detonating the equivalent of 10,000 tons of TNT, but it’s still ridiculously destructive any way you slice it.
Neutron bombs were produced, but the the time frame was more like the early to mid-1980s, not the Nixon era.
Also, while the damage from heat and blast effects are considerably lower than standard design thermonuclear bombs, there is still a great deal of heat and blast effects, so “almost no damage to structures” is not really an accurate statement. Also, the neutron flux will activate many elements in the blast zone (causing them to become radioactive), and while this effect primarily produces short-lived radionuclides, the radiation in the vicinity of the blast can be quite high for a few days.
Basically, the weapons were designed to produce a large flux of neutrons at the time of the blast, which has very deleterious effects to living things.
See here:
The paragraph at the end is rather chilling:
The purpose was never to “leave the buildings still standing”. The primary purpose was to incapacitate tanks (by incapacitating their drivers), something that standard nukes can’t actually do reliably. Since such weapons are primarily intended for tactical targets like tanks, rather than strategic targets like cities, they’re an example of what’s called tactical nuclear weapons (which does not necessarily mean, as is often assumed, that they’re smaller or weaker than strategic weapons).
Nonsense. All nuclear weapons destroy all buildings within their rather sizable blast radius, severely damage them within a larger ring of destruction, and cause massive fires within an even larger ring affected by a ‘thermal pulse’ of superheated air.
There’s a reason we tested all of them in a desolate desert, isolated Pacific islands (some of which no longer exist as a result), and in deep underground caverns.
Paranoid fantasies. There are few weapons as misunderstood as nuclear bombs.
But the building damage was not nearly as great as the regular bombs, which had ten times the yield and double the blast radius (roughly). It was the perfect weapon for a real estate developer who just wanted to bomb the slums and leave the burbs untouched, but unpopulated. Big park in the old slums, true Americans resettled in the nice parts. Ah, the good old days.
Efficiency and progress is ours once more, now that we have the Neutron bomb. The sun beams down on a brand new day. No more welfare tax to pay!
(You’ve been talking to Jello again, haven’t you?)
//Pounds head on table//
Bolding in quote above mine -
Thermal pulse has nothing to do with superheated air; truly misunderstood indeed.
//Stops pounding head//
From the Federation of American Scientists website and numerous other sources. -
"The energy of a nuclear explosion is transferred to the surrounding medium in three distinct forms: blast; thermal radiation; and nuclear radiation. The distribution of energy among these three forms will depend on the yield of the weapon, the location of the burst, and the characteristics of the environment. For a low altitude atmospheric detonation of a moderate sized weapon in the kiloton range, the energy is distributed roughly as follows:
50% as blast;
***35% as thermal radiation; made up of a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light and some soft x-ray emitted at the time of the explosion***; and
15% as nuclear radiation; including 5% as initial ionizing radiation consisting chiefly of neutrons and gamma rays emitted within the first minute after detonation, and 10% as residual nuclear radiation. Residual nuclear radiation is the hazard in fallout."smithsb: OK, I should have known that. Thank you.
That particualr feature is a property of all nuclear weapons, not just neutron-enhanced. As the radiation intensity drops off with distance from the blast, there is a ring where people absorb a lethal, but not promptly lethal, dose. They’re doomed. Just like the severely burned or maimed. The difference is the irradiated will expire in weeks, not minutes or hours. Wounds are a bitch.
At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, awareness of the walking dead dawned as the later deaths unfolded. For anybody who’s been paying any attention since then, this has been common knowledge. Hence the common refrain about prefering to be at Ground Zero versus 10 miles out.
I second Derleth’s point. Nukes are weapons. They create death and destruction. They aren’t magical, mystical, nor fundamentally different in that from a sharp stick. And they pale in comparison to things we’ll invent some day.
The sooner we banish the word “unthinkable” from our thinking, the sooner we’ll be able to deal rationally with the reality of their existence, and with the near certainty they’ll be used against us some day, most likely within the lifetimes of most current SDMBers.
I don’t know if this a technically a neutron bomb but it was designed to be hand launched, low detonation, minimal structural damage with nasty radiation that would kill everything but with a short half life. I believe it is 2-3 kilotons as opposed to 30-40,000 like Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
The U.S. developed the neutron bomb largely to counter any possible Warsaw Pact armored thrust into Western Europe. Since NATO’s conventional forces were significantly smaller than the Warsaw Pact’s, and NATO defense doctrine was that any war there would probably “go nuclear” sooner rather than later, it was thought that neutron bombs would at least cause less destruction than conventional nuclear weapons. The Soviets, of course, adroitly spun this to suggest that the devilish NATO leaders didn’t care if people died, so long as buildings were left intact.
Who misses the Cold War? Not me. :rolleyes:
No, not a neutron bomb.
I doubt it. I mean, we already have the capacity to build bigger nukes than the ones we stockpile - most of the US arsenal is in the hundreds of kilotons, whilst the Russians have more megaton-range weapons. (The reason being, as I understand it, that the Russians never developed quite as good a targeting capacity as we enjoyed - they would tend to miss by more, so they’d need a bigger boom to make sure they got the job done.)
Our existing weapons are more than adequate for any conceivable need, including the devastation of many, many cities. What more could we want?
Just wait till some bright-spark invents an anti-matter bomb…why have mass/energy conversion in the low percentage efficiency range when you can have almost total conversion…
I’ve never believed nuclear weapons could ‘Destroy the planet/all life/humanity’ but anti-matter weapons could.
Sort of… it’s true that most bombs have serious prompt radiation (what ER weapons specialize in), but for anything besides an ER weapon, the lethal radius of the prompt radiation is WELL WITHIN the lethal radii of both heat and blast.
So at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you didn’t really see radiation casualties, or if you did, it was a TINY percentage of the 100k killed (mostly by blast, heat and the firestorm).
ER weapons are specifically devised to have a prompt radiation effect radius LARGER than those from the heat and blast. That’s what makes them what they are.
And Buran, I’d bet you see anti-matter boosted weapons before you’d see pure antimatter weapons. Annihilating matter & antimatter gives off LOTS of neutrons and energy, which would be ideal in the center of an implosion bomb- better than tritium by quite a bit, I’d reckon. Plus, if you could gather enough, it’s conceivable that you could set off a fusion secondary stage without the usual fission bomb trigger, which would make for significantly reduced fallout weapons relative to today’s thermonuclear weapons.
“Enhanced radiation” warheads were also used on interceptors like LIM-49 ‘Spartan’ and the undesignated ‘Sprint’ to destroy incoming RVs. (The Spartan used a warhead enhanced for x-ray output, but the warhead for Sprint, being endoatmospheric, was optimized for neutron output as x-rays would be absorbed and turned into thermal energy within the atmosphere, substantially reducing the effective kill radius.) The MGM-72 ‘Lance’ also had an ERN warhead (W70-3), and the MGM-31 ‘Pershing II’ and and BGM-109G ‘Gryphon’ ('Glick ‘Em’) had ERN warheads conceptually designed but never deployed. (It’s not clear whether they were ever produced in any quantity or not.)
The advantage of an enhanced radiation ‘neutron’ bomb is not, as stated upthread, to kill with minimal damage, but rather to disable or destroy targets that are armored and relatively impervious to near-miss blast attacks. A neutron weapon would activate fissionable material via fast fission reactions, in particular, make the dense depleted uranium material used for modern tank armor radioactive. This would also make a lot of short-term isotopes which would make the near-blast area unhealthy to inhabit over a wider range than a weapon designed for blast effects.
The difference between ‘tactical’ and ‘strategic’ nuclear weapons is more of a semantic art than a practical one. It was generally recognized that an nuclear exchange, even of strictly tactical weapons on a definable battlefield between powers with large nuclear arsenals and relative parity carried a very strong likelihood of escalation; if your opponent can wipe out an entire infantry, armor, or artillery brigade, there is really little reason to field an army; even moreso for the deployment of naval surface warfare or logistical ships. Instead, you might as well just respond in kind and with more force…which leads to an unstable, progressive feedback. The American response to this was deterrence and the philosophy of Assured Destruction, and the dangerous policy of “Launch on Warning”. The Soviets were never as convinced about the value of deterrence, and spent considerable money and effort on ABM systems with very limited success.
Stranger
My co-worker who drives an RV around to all the dog shows better watch out.
RR
The article quite clearly states that it was a 10-500 ton weapon. At the upper end it was only half a kiloton.
You’re also off by a couple of orders of magnitude on Fat Man and Little Boy. Fat Man was approximately 21 kilotons (or 21,000 tons) and Little Boy was between 15 and 18 kilotons. 30-40,000 kilotons would be 30-40 megatons.