[ExI] better than Google

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 2:00 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> You guys and gals.  What I want to know is whatever happened to the
> neutron bomb?  Wasn't it supposed to kill people but leave buildings
> intact?  Maybe it was really dirty, radiation-wise.   bill w
>

Actually a neutron bomb is very clean, it produces far less radioactive
fallout than a regular garden variety nuclear bomb because most of its
energy is not in the form of a sudden release of heat (aka explosive power)
but in a burst of extremely high energy neutrons, a burst that lasts for
just a small fraction of a second but would be enough to be lethal even if
you were inside a Soviet tank in the 1980s that was invading Europe. A
Neutron Bomb is just a special type of thermonuclear H-bomb in which the
fission trigger is made as small as possible and the fusion secondary is
made as large as possible. The main reason Neutron Bombs never became
popular is not ethical its economic, it's a very expensive way to kill
people, there are much cheaper ways to achieve megadeath.

For a any type of H-bomb to work it needs lots of Tritium and Neutron Bombs
are no exception, regular H-bombs make their own Tritium instantly on the
spot when the Fission trigger goes off, but for that to happen a lot of
fallout is produced, so for the Neutron Bomb a bombmaker must supply lots
of Tritium beforehand on his own. The trouble is pound for pound Tritium is
MUCH more expensive to make that either U-235 or Plutonium, and even worse
its half life is only 12.5 years, so your nuclear stockpile would need lots
of constant and very expensive maintenance to remain workable.

John K Clark
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