"fallout" is the radioactive material created by the fission, that slowly "falls out" of the sky. neutrons are NOT fallout, they are part of the radiation given by the reaction. there , passed through, gone. big pulse.
Even if you had NO fission whatsoever, it would still be considered a neutron bomb, wouldn't it? Simply put, its not the best method of taking out other in flight missiles. emp devices, or midair cluster or fuel air (or clustered fuel air) would work a lot better. On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Kyle Mcallister <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- 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 > > > > >
