--- leaking pen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > pure fusion would be a so called "neutron bomb" > > high emp, lots of radiation, little blast. if they > worked, you could > basically drop a few dozen, instantly kill most of > the population, > wait a year, go in and use all the land and > buildings and such, no > sweat, just some corpse clean up. > basically, you WOULDNT use a pure fusion device to > block icbms.
We're not talking the same thing, at least on a sense of 'relative scaling'. For instance, let's say you have a bomb which produces a blast of 57 megatons, 97% of which comes from fusion alone (very clean). As luck (?!) has it, this was built and tested by the USSR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba If we knock off that 3% and use what's left as a basis for pure-fusion (in my scenario), we've got a bit more than a 55 megaton bomb. That is not a neutron bomb, it's a crustbuster. Blast damage would far exceed the neutron lethal radius, and thermal burns from the long lasting fireball would far exceed even that. The general idea is: 'these guys' know how to build a weapon that can be scaled dependant almost entirely on how much fusion fuel (probably lithium-6 deuteride) is present in said device. A wee bit gets you a quonset-hut-crusher. A bucketload gets you a mushroom cloud bigger than you can shake a stick at. I *don't* want to touch anti-matter, for a couple reasons... 1. It's been done to death worse than Dracula. 2. There's no easy way to make it actually explode with a nuclear-level blast. As far as we know, it just blows apart before it reacts efficiently (you can't mix the stuff with its own weight in normal matter fast enough) and what's left 'burns' slowly. Bad, yes, but not quite the same thing. 3. It hints of Star Trek, which ain't what I'm aiming for. Obviously a lot of neutrons are going to be released, unless there is some other reaction scheme that can be nearly or totally aneutronic. p + B? I don't know if that could ever be 'bombified.' So my concern is, how much fallout could we expect due to neutron activation? --Kyle
