Whatever became of the Neutron Bomb? Remember? The one that was primarily a flash of neutrons that would shoot like x-rays and kill people but leave buildings standing.
Are we developing it? Do we worry that someone else is testing it?
It sounded gross, but at the same time producing less toxic contaminants, thus actually being more like conventional weapons.
Ehm - the purpose if the neutron bomb wasn’t to “kill people and leave buildings standing”. The idea was to use neutron radiation as a tactical weapon, in other words, to “kill people in tanks and leave people in bunkers alive”.
Neutrons go through steel without a problem, but will be stopped by a thick layer of earth. Imagine an armoured division rolling towards a defensive line. The defending soldiers are dug in (i.e., reasonably well protected from neutron radiation), while the attackers are in effect sitting in steel boxes and unprotected. The radiation will hit the attackers way harder then the defenders, hopefully disrupting the attack.
The neutron bomb got a lot of bad press, and I must admit that it does seem somewhat distasteful. Radiation sickness is not a good way to go.
Anyway, since the next war is not going to be fought against Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into Germany, the tactical circumstances really aren’t there. With the political cost of having the bombs being high and the weapon only useful in specific scenarios, why bother ?
S. Norman
And in any case, the Neutron bomb was never as non-destructive as the media made it out to be–it was still a nuclear bomb, just a particularly messy one. The radius of the circle of dead people would have been larger than the radius of the circle of destroyed infrastucture, but a nuclear explosion is a nuclear explosion-we weren’t gonna bomb the Kremlin and leave St. Basil’s standing.
Back in the 80s I had a comic book called Meet Mr. Bomb: “Neutron attack? Disguise yourself as a building!” I wish I still had it.
This is true. It’s essentially a small fission-fusion-fission bomb with the final fission stage removed, allowing the wave of neutron and gamma radiation to escape instead of triggering further reactions.
In any case, saving infrastructure wasn’t even the main point. The enhanced radiation bomb would still have left a radius of devastated land just as big; it’s just that within that radius, you would have a 99+% tank kill rate instead of maybe 50%.
I know that saving infrastructure wasn’t the reason the DoD wanted a neutron bomb, but that was how it was discussd in the media. There at the end of the cold war I think some people clung to this idea as a sorta black hope: “The neutron bomb will kill everybody and leave the buildings standing, so even if we all die, civilization will go on.” This myth has lingered, and I have met many people over the years who believed it. As tragic as death is, the thought of having everything destroyed is also tramatic, and I find it ironic that the neutron bomb–the messiest bomb around–is often seen as somehow being “better” or “cleaner”.
Unfortuneately, the neutron bomb isn’t even the messiest thing around. That title belongs to the cobolt bomb, which has (we hope) never been built, but is estimated to be capable of producing enough fallout (cobolt-60, specifically) to render the entire planet inhospitable for years. Remember Dr. Strangelove?
26.3 years, roughly. Depending on the size of the bomb. Even “Cobalt Bombs” aren’t magic.
Using the standard of a Controlled Surface Contamination Area (CSCA) of 450 micro-micro Curies (4.50 x 10[sup]-11[/sup]), and an assumed global land area of 57.470 x 10[sup]6[/sup] square miles, it would require roughly 7.21 x10[sup]5[/sup] Curies, perfectly evenly distributed, to turn the globe into a CSCA. Granting that turning half the globe into a CSCA would be sufficient to declare the plannet functionally contaminated, that still calls for 3.6 x 10[sup]5[/sup] Curies. That’s a large bomb. Someone else, if they want, can do the Curies-to-mass calculations.
Please note that the CSCA definition is wrapped around the concept of minimum useful detection, not around health risks, which are effectively indiscernable at that level of contamination.
My RadCon instructers would have only given me partial credit…
I forgot the "…per 100 cm[sup]2[/sup]. That changes the size of the bomb upwards. Very much upwards.
The correct figures are: 6.69 x 10[sup]6[/sup], and 3.35 x 10[sup]6[/sup], respectively.
Terribly sorry about that…