Does anyone have any information about neutron bombs or why the US decided to halt their development? To me it doesn’t make sense – I heard that the US didn’t want to further neutron bomb development because of the risk of enemies getting their hands on one, or the technology to build one, but what about atomic bombs then… Any information, please! Thanks.
I am D Izzy:confused:
Here’s a site that has a good explanation of how neutron bombs work and the reasons they were developed, but it doesn’t say (at least on this page) why the U.S. discontinued them.
http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq1.html
The above link says neutron bombs were mainly built for use against tanks, although they also have potential anti-missile uses. During the Cold War they were deployed because of the threat of a big tank-based Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
I assume they were discontinued because after the fall of the Soviet Union our defense needs changed and they weren’t considered necessary anymore. They are more expensive to build and maintain than other weapons because of the tritium fuel they use, so I assume that’s why we don’t keep any on hand now that we’re only facing enemies that don’t have anything approaching superior tank forces.
As for their potential anti-missile use, I’m not sure about this, but I think we don’t keep them for that because of the ABM treaty.
Mostly what Bob says, and also possibly in small part because the Soviets began lining their tanks with lead.
Actually, we may still have some around, but since they were principally aimed at defeating the overwhelming Soviet tank armies attacking western Europe, they don’t have a lot of value.
I think the above explanations nail it really. It’s a weapon with a fairly specific range of uses: mass destruction of large armoured forces, or destruction of urban populations with reduced damage to the urban centre itself (in comparison to a ‘plain’ nuclear weapon, anyway), theoretically as a precursor to invasion and capture.
I don’t think the US has a current need for a weapon for either of those roles at present. On cost grounds alone it’s probably unjustifiable.
As long as we’re on the subject, since I assume this is the assumption of the OP - neutron bombs are not magic people-killers as everyone likes to think. I’m getting so tired of people saying ‘we have secret neutron bombs that we can use to take out everyone in a city without destroying anything!’.
They were developed as tactical weapons to penetrate tank armor with high speed neutrons to neutralize tank crews more quickly than regular nuclear weapons. I’m not sure where the magic superweapon angle started, but it sure is annoying.
Thanks a lot everyone! You’ve helped me out a lot, I’ve been wondering about the whole neutron bomb situation for quite some time. 
I think this is a really interesting subject for some reason, and the site I linked to has an informative, concise discussion of it that elaborates on what SenorBeef and Milton said. Anyone who’s curious about nuclear weapons physics should check it out.
My recollection was that the neutron bomb was halted because a bomb that “kills people but leaves buildings standing” was morally worse somehow than a bomb that both killed people and destroyed buildings. I think the idea was it made war less messy, and therefore more likely to occur. I thought this occurred during the Carter administration, but Bob Scene’s link (interesting reading, BTW) suggests I’m remebering arguments surrounding the W66 warhead, retired in Aug., 1975. Can anyone confirm that this argument was put forth at the time?
I remember that blonde, Australian singer.
Olivia Neutron-Bomb.
Given that neutron bombs WEREN’T bombs that “kill people but leave buildings standing”, if there were debates along those lines, they were horribly misguided.
Senorbeef: I’ve seen the “neutron bomb = magic death ray” claim repeated in several books. Apparently, this misconception is quite wide-spread.
My understanding is that neutron bombs are just plain ol’ nukes that are designed to give off more radiation than usual, and thus affect people farther away from the blast area. Is this accurate?
ZenBeam is essentially right. To be sure here were military reasons not to do it, and outlined in the excellent posts above are the main reasons Regan ultimately decided not to reverse Carter on deployment (as far as you know) - like he did did on development.
But Carter’s decision was overwhelmingly a political, not a military, decision (and to be fair so to an extent was Regan’s). It predated but foreshadowed the big assed Euro-protests when Regan put the short-range nukes into Europe.
The Neutron bomb, some of the (proto-Green) Europeans said, made nuclear war more likely: as the U.S. and USSR could rebuild Europe in their own images with infrastructure intact, knowing that the radiation dissipated very quickly and there would be less fallout. All perhaps making nukes less horrible and more “contemplatable” It was, as mentioned, also seen as somehow more morally ambiguous than traditional nukes. Mainly tho I think the Euros didn’t like the idea of another new kind of short range, probably defensive, nuke on their soil to be used on thier soil.
Here is a cite where you can really get into the whole Carter debate, but it co$t$
Strategic nuclear weapons are used to bust cities and military installations. Tactical nuclear weapons are used to bust enemy forces. Neutron bombs were the latter.
Conventional nuclear bombs are great at killing enemy infantry, but not especially good at killing tank crews. All that armor is good for blocking radiation and blast wave effects. A big concern during tactical nuclear fulda gap scenarios.
And so a nuclear weapon was designed that would produce high energy radiation in a larger proportion to conventional nukes, in order to inflict an incapacitating dose of radiation to tank crews. As all tactical nuclear weapons, it’s range is very limited (under 2 KM, really), and wouldn’t be used to destroy cities or anything like that.
And for that matter, it is still a regular fission bomb. It’ll have just as much nuclear blast/shockwave/etc. effect as any other tactical nuke of the same yield.
The mechanism of how it works is, I believe… fusion bombs are detonated by a fission bomb that superheats tritium and deuterium to release huge amounts of high energy neutrons into the fusion core. In neutron bombs, the same tritium and deuterium are there to produce neutrons, but the bomb jacket (which normally contains the neutrons) are removed, and there’s no second stage fusion core. And so all the neutrons are directed outwards, rather than to another stage. That’s all - nothing mysterious or magical about them, just regular nukes with extra high energy neutrons to penetrate armor.
Thanks, Senor
The neutron bomb was originally designed to be used in the Safeguard ABM system inthe 60’s /70’s.The system had two missiles ,the Spartan which was an improved Nike designed to destroy missiles in space and the Sprint which was the second layer ,to get them as they entered the atmosphere.I saw a film in AF training of a Sprint test launch ,they said it reached 50000 feet in under 3 seconds.As previous stated,the decision to pull them out of Europe was a purely political one by Carter.The reason they were scheduled to be deployed there was the fact the Red Army had tens of thousands of tanks prepared to invade Western Europe and as i heard many times ,"the towns in Europe are only 2 kilotons apart."We couldn’t afford to match them tank for tank so this was an equalizer.
“the towns in Europe are only 2 kilotons apart.” This would make a great signature.
What decision to retire neutron bombs made by Carter are people referring to? Here’s the history of their deployment from the site linked above:
Carter was president from 1977 to 1981. It looks like, if anything, he might have delayed deployment of some ER weapons, but none of them were made or in deployment while he was President, so he couldn’t have “pulled them out of Europe.” All of the retirement of neutron bombs from Europe was done while Reagan and Bush were President.
To clarify what SenorBeef said, neutron bombs are very-low-yield fission bombs that use an easily-ignited mixture of deuterium and tritium (instead of lithium deuteride) that releases most of its energy as neutron kinetic energy instead of blast and heat.
Conventional fission bombs have unenriched uranium in them that can undergo what’s called “fast fission” when it absorbs these high-energy neutrons. The fast fission ordinarily greatly increases the yield of a bomb, but neutron bombs are designed to let all the neutrons out so they can kill people, or in the case of anti-missile weapons they can induce fast fission in the fissionable material in an incoming warhead and damage it.
If you wanted to kill people without destroying buildings you’d have better luck with neutron bombs than other kinds of bombs, but I still think you’d be disappointed in the results. The real purpose was to zap commie tank crews with a form of radiation that attenuates quickly in the atmosphere so that NATO troops nearby would be fairly safe. The lethal range of radiation does exceed the blast radius, but quite a bit of the area that gets a lethal dose of radiation also gets smashed and burned up, and the extremely low yields of these weapons (mostly 1 kiloton or less) doesn’t stop them from putting out a lot of radioactive fallout that would lower real estate values all over the place.
Carter proposed modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal by installing neutron warheads on the Lance missile and artillery shells for deployment in Europe. Under huge pressure from NATO [esp.W. Germany], domestically and other quarters (for reasons I note above), Cater cancelled the development and deployment of these neutron weapons in 1978. In 1981 Reagan approved development, but not deployment stating unequivocally that the weapons would be stored in the U.S., but could be deployed to Europe quickly and without notice should the situation warrant.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates there may be 350 Neutron weapons in the US arsenal today, as Lance Missile warheads and artillery shells - no one can be 100% sure tho. These may be the only Neutron weapons on earth (or not)…
Here’s a cite for Carter-Reagan stuff you were asking about
Wow!.. The original reason I asked about neutron bombs was simply to show my brother a thing or two, we argue about a lot of different things… I think I’ll show him a thing or 100,000 now:D
I am D Izzy