When I was a youth — which was likely before most of you were born — there was talk of a “cobalt bomb”. Even though this was at the height of the cold war, I presumed that most of the talk was exaggeration, e.g., I had even heard things like a single bomb could crack the earth in half, and so forth. But in the last thirty years or so, I haven’t heard anything about it at all. Was there ever such a thing as a cobalt bomb that was more powerful than a hydrogen bomb?
IIRC, there was talk of a very large (I can’t remember if it was 500 megaton or 5,000 megaton or 50,000 megaton) “radiocobalt bomb” that could be built out of a number of hydrogen bombs and a large amount of radioactive cobalt. After detonation, the cobalt dust would spread around the globe and irradiate everything, killing us all.
It wouldn’t crack the earth in half, but it was supposed to be enough to wipe out all of humanity, at least, and keep the earth’s surface uninhabitable long enough for anybody who escaped the initial slaying to run out of supplies in their underground bunkers or caves or whatever, forcing them to either starve or come out and die as well.
I believe this was what the “doomsday weapon” in Dr. Strangelove was supposed to be, too. But I don’t believe anything approaching this was ever built, for obvious reasons. As to whether it really would have worked, I’ll leave that to people who know more than I do about the subject. And who aren’t about to fall asleeeeeeee
Weirdly enough I remember too having heard of “cobalt bombs” when I was young, but I was pretty convinced they weren’t military stuff but rather a nickname for the primitive medical devices used for radiotherapy.
No, they ain’t medical devices.
No true Cobalt Bomb has ever been built.
Yet.
The only context I ever heard this was not an especially powerful bomb, but one that had been salted with radioactive cobalt, so as to be particularly “dirty”, and produce a lot of anti-personnel fallout. Sort of the opposite of the neutron bomb.
Can’t remember the source, so no cite.
Regards,
Shodan
The idea was for the cobalt shell to be saturated with neutrons and transmuted into Cobalt 60 a long lived gamma radiators (~5 years). The sheer amount of such radioactive fallout would effectively wipe out all life in a particular region.
All I get is a 404.
Wikipedia has stuff too.
The immediate source of the plot device in Dr. Strangelove is surely the “Domesday Machine” that Herman Kahn considered in On Thermonuclear War (1960). This was intended as a thought experiment: in Spencer Weart’s description of it, an exploration of “the ultimate in deterrence though assured destruction”. I don’t know whether Kahn ever made a link to Szilard’s earlier, not entirely dissimilar, consideration of a cobalt bomb or even whether he proposed any mechanism at all whereby it could actually be built.
Weirdly, it appears you’re also right.
Rather obviously, that should be “Doomsday Machine”.
As I recall, the doomsday device (not “machine”) in Dr. Strangelove was designated “cobalt-thorium-G”.
Cobalt bombs are refe4enced in the original Star Trek once, as being impressive but significantly less destructive than a small quantity of anti-matter.
What about a 1920’s style “Doomsday Machine?”
The Star Trek mention of cobalt bombs perpetuated a misconception that they’re more powerful than “ordinary” nuclear bombs. They’re not; they just generate even more deadly fallout.
A “cobalt” bomb is a nuclear weapon encased in ordinary cobalt, Co-59. The bomb generates a huge burst of neutrons that converts it into radioactive cobalt-60. This same reaction is performed in nuclear reactors to make Co-60 for medical and industrial uses, albeit far more slowly.
Cobalt 60 is a hard gamma emitter with a 5 year half life, adding significantly to the bomb’s fallout.
Bombs aren’t all that clean even without cobalt, though. Many large “thermonuclear” weapons still produce most of their energy by fissioning a jacket of natural or even depleted uranium. U-238 can’t sustain a chain reaction but it will fission from the burst of “hot” neutrons from a fusion explosion. This produces huge amounts of fallout with radioactive isotopes of all kinds. Read up on the “Ivy Mike” (77% fission) and “Castle Bravo” (67% fission) tests for good examples.
The cleanest bomb ever detonated (97% fusion) was the USSR’s enormous 50 MT “Czar Bomba”. It was designed to produce 100 MT with a uranium jacket that would have created huge amounts of fallout, but even then cooler heads prevailed and an inert lead jacket was substituted.
Dude, this thread is eight years old and I have a lasting suspicion that the OP is dead, though that’s never been confirmed. Probably not worth checking in to set matters straight.
Liberal is dead? I thought he took a publicized sabbatical.
IIRC, in the year or so before he left, he said that he had some medical problem which gave him a life expectancy of less than a year, and if he’s on a sabbatical, it’s been a very long one. So, yes, likely dead.
The OP last was active on this site in July 2010. He said he was leaving in order to work on a book. However, his “I only have a year to live” claim took place about five years before that. So I would take that with a large box of salt. While I have no direct knowledge of his status, some people here know him IRL so that I suspect we might hear about it if he had passed away.
In any case, since this thread is so old and the OP is no longer posting, I’m going to close it.
Colibri
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