[ExI] better than Google

Darin Sunley dsunley at gmail.com
Tue Jun 2 22:18:05 UTC 2020


The biggest fuel-air explosive bombs get, iirc, just barely into the range
of the smallest tactical nukes.

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 3:51 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200602/c694315d/attachment.htm>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list