This post was inspired by Machine_Elf’s thread on radiation levels.
When I was in high school studying U.S. history, I remember a blurb on “The Neutron Bomb” and how a former president, Jimmy Carter, banned its production because it was deemed to be so horrible. At least, that was my impression at the time. Since then, I always had the belief that the Neutron Bomb was some hideous and more advanced nuclear weapon, a weapon that was as more awful than the Hydrogen Bomb than the Hydrogen Bomb was more awful than the Atomic Bomb.
However, this doesn’t seem to be the case. I am going to past the “what is” definition here because, quite frankly, I don’t understand it.
The neutron bomb is a small hydrogen bomb. The neutron bomb differs from standard nuclear weapons insofar as its primary lethal effects come from the radiation damage caused by the neutrons it emits. It is also known as an enhanced-radiation weapon (ERW).
The augmented radiation effects mean that blast and heat effects are reduced so that physical structures including houses and industrial installations, are less affected. Because neutron radiation effects drop off very rapidly with distance, there is a sharper distinction between areas of high lethality and areas with minimal radiation doses.
This was desired by the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), since they have to be prepared to fight in densely populated areas; any tactical nuclear explosion will endanger civilian lives and property.
This seems to indicate that it is simply a small H-Bomb and nothing more. The “small” is what limits the physical damage, I assume. However, if it is small, how much radiation could it generate so that it would be banned because it supposedly is so darn horrible? I’m not understanding this. Explanations would be appreciated.
From what I remember there were two parts to the judgement of hideous.
1 - Deliberately targeting civilian people while leaving their things to take later.
2 - Increasing the number of people who died in agony over time, rather than dying nearly instantly.
That second one brings it closer to chemical or biological weapons.
The big thing is that the design of the bomb has been altered to reduce blast effects, while enhancing the radiation effects. This is contrary to most other bomb designs, which over time tried to limit the radiation while increasing the blast yield.
From a military standpoint, the radiation was always a (mostly) unwanted side-effect. It was nasty, hard to control, and as big a danger to your own side as to the enemy. The neutron bomb turns that philosophy on its head.
Leaders like to pretend that the goal of war is to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight - cut off their supply lines, destroy their factories, disrupt transportation, etc. The goal is not to kill people, especially civilians. Everyone knows it’s BS, but it’s a fiction they allow themselves to believe.
The neutron bomb makes it impossible to pretend the goal is anything except killing people, and therefore isn’t acceptable.
As I recall, the idea was generated because soviet tanks were thought to have high survivability again the blast of tactical nuclear weapons, but their crews would be vulnerable to a massive radiation pulse.
The idea of a bomb that killed people but left their stuff intact was perfect for Soviet propaganda. The final nail in the coffin was the calculation that most of the Soviet tank crews would become walking dead men, and thus likely to fight harder in the short term, failing the bomb’s intended mission.
This is actually what the ERW/Neutron Bomb tries to bypass. Inside an NBC shielded tank or other armored vehicle, it is possible to receive a radiation dose from a ‘normal’ nuclear weapon that will ultimately be lethal, but after the immediate symptoms (nausea, diarrhea, headache, fever, cognitive impairment) subside there follows a latency period lasting from a week to a month dependent on the dose before death, as can be seen on the dosage table for acute radiation syndrome here. The idea behind a neutron bomb is to deliver such an intense level of radiation that even those protected by an NBC system in armored vehicles would receive an immediate dose so high (8Gy and above) that there is no latency period between initial symptoms and death so that there wouldn’t be this time period when they would be walking dead men; they would never recover from the initial symptoms and enter the latency period but would be incapacitated from exposure until death.
I’m a little late because the post above me got it.
There was a myth created around the “neutron bomb” that you could set one off in a city and leave everything intact but kill everyone there - so you could walk in and take the place over. That was never the intent nor would it work like that. Sure, the blast radius is reduced compared to a conventional design, but it’s still a nuclear weapon - it’s certainly not a magic weapon that leaves everything intact.
The actual design purpose was as a tactical weapon to kill people in NBC-protected vehicles. Putting mass between you and a nuclear blast would absorb significant amounts of both the blast and radiation. Those vehicles were designed to be able to fight in a nuclear-contaminated area, and using conventional tactical nuclear weapons the concern was that even with a successful use the armored vehicles in the area would protect the crews and passengers enough that they’d be able to continue fighting. The ERW weapons were designed to give enough of a big dose of high-energy neutrons that could penetrate the armor of those vehicles and kill the crew in short order.
I thought one description of them was “fizzled conventional atomic bomb explosions”. The blast part fizzled (less powerful) but all the energetic neutrons still got produced. Being neutrons, they were harder to shield against.
Upon detonation, a near-ground airburst of a 1 kiloton neutron bomb would produce a large blast wave and a powerful pulse of both thermal radiation and ionizing radiation in the form of fast (14.1 MeV) neutrons. The thermal pulse would cause third degree burns to unprotected skin out to approximately 500 meters. The blast would create pressures of at least 4.6 psi (32 kPa) out to a radius of 600 meters, which would severely damage all non-reinforced concrete structures. At the conventional effective combat range against modern main battle tanks and armored personnel carriers (< 690–900 m), the blast from a 1 kt neutron bomb would destroy or damage to the point of nonusability almost all un-reinforced civilian buildings.
Military aircraft drop routinely drop conventional bombs with 1000-2000 pounds of explosive yield, although there are also 15,000-pound bombs that can be dropped from the back of cargo planes (see BLU-82 and MOAB). a 1-kiloton neutron bomb is the equivalent of 1000 tons, or 2,000,000 pounds, of TNT. That’s less than what Hiroshima and Nagasaki got (15-20 kt), but it’s still a damn big bang.
You’re talking about two different things, here. Fallout is material kicked up by the bomb: Basically dust and debris made of radioactive material. Being dust, it’s carried by the wind wherever the wind takes it, and it settles down wherever the wind drops it, and it persists. Nobody wants that anywhere near them (and for energetic-enough blasts, “anywhere near” includes the entire hemisphere), because it’s as uncontrollable as the wind.
Prompt radiation, however, is there for a moment, and then gone. When you turn off the light in a room, you don’t worry about there being some stray light stuck to the walls. It’s more controllable, not less.
Basically they’re as small in terms of blast and heat as they can be made- a tiny primary, and a small fusion secondary, and everything’s engineered to produce as much neutron radiation as possible.
With a normal weapon- say 1 kiloton, the 5 psi (most buildings destroyed) blast radius is about 500 meters, the 3rd degree burn radius is about 790 meters, and the 8000 rem prompt radiation radius (lethal to all people in a short time frame) is about 375 meters.
A 1 kt enhanced radiation weapon will have the same blast/flash radii (that’s what 1 kt means!), but the lethal radiation radius is extended out to 850 meters. By comparison, a 10 kt “normal” weapon only puts out 8000 rem at 630 meters.
So in military terms, a tank at 700 meters would be safe from the 1 kt bomb, as tanks are highly resistant to blast and flash, and it would be well outside the lethal radius for radiation. But at 700 meters from a 1 kt ER weapon, the crew would be lethally irradiated. THAT was the real military utility of the ER weapons; NATO could effectively nuke attacking Russians without absolutely obliterating Germany in the process, as in order to take out tanks otherwise, you’re looking at relatively large (10kt or larger) tactical nukes, instead of 1kt artillery shell sized nukes.
I think the main opposition to them was because with the dramatically lower blast/flash/fallout and high effectiveness versus conventional nukes, there was a lot of fear that politicians and commanders would be more likely to actually use them in a future conflict.
A 1 kt explosion is not all that large relatively speaking. The Beirut fertilizer explosion from a couple of years ago was about 2.7 kilotons. Russia recently detonated a multiple kiloton explosion in Ukraine for some reason. A typical ammo dump being hit probably comes close to a kiloton or more. In 2017 a Soviet-era ammo dump exploded in Ukraine, 32 kilotons of explosives detonated.
The fear of ‘neutron bombs’ is precisely that they can be airburst and kill a lot of soldiers in vehicles and outside of them, without kicking up much fallout. That makes them much more likely to be used in a combat situation.
I think what really killed them as a concept was the rise of smart, high accuracy weapons. It used to be that if you had to hit a specific target you had to saturation bomb it to ensure getting it. A tactical nuke solved that problem. But a much better solution involves targeting each vehicle with a high accuracy munition. I just don’t think there’s much of a use case for neutron bombs any more. Maybe if there were 1,000 Soviet tanks in columns streaming through the Fulda Gap - that’s the use case those weapons were probably designed for.
In Ukraine, the battles are much more dispersed. Lone HIMARS launchers shooting and scooting, that sort of thing. We’re not seeing 10,000 infantry with 500 tanks in a giant formation. Nukes have a limited usefulness there as anything other than a terror weapon.
