Enlighten me a bit—wouldn’t it be in everyone’s best interest not to nuke the daylights out of one another but build a bomb that would do damage just to people and nothing else?
Yeah, I know, dumb question, but I haven’t had enough caffiene today.
That was kinda sorta the reasoning behind the neutron bomb of the late 1980s, which was developed primarily to kill Soviet tank columns invading Western Europe while not laying too much waste to the densely-populated aforementioned Western Europe. Of course, that’s not how the USSR’s ace propagandists spun it. :rolleyes:
I always figured if you were going to take over a country, why destroy the infrastructure and factories you’re going to need?
A nuclear bomb will destroy infrastructure. There’s just no way around that. Now, there are weapons which will kill people but leave most infrastructure intact, like chemical and biological weapons, but those have their own sets of problems.
And the primary motivation behind the neutron bomb wasn’t that conventional nukes were too destructive, but that they weren’t destructive enough. A neutron bomb can disable tanks (by killing their crews) in a larger radius than a blasty bomb can.