Real neutron weapons, Many questions, not so many answers Options

[(USA)Bruce]

I got plenty of quesions such as;

When was it tested?

How was it tested?

How long was the duration?

[MARS]

Proposed in 1958 by Samuel Cohen, tested in Nevada in 1963, put on hold by President Carter in 1978, continued by President Reagan in 1981.

Underground, in Nevada.

If you're talking about fallout patterns, those depend entirely on the circumstances of an actual bomb use. If it's a ground burst, the whole thing is generally more messy because a lot of irradiated dust gets sucked up into the mushroom cloud and scattered over a large area whereas an air burst may reduce this effect somewhat. It's also worth noting that even though neutron bombs are designed to release most of their energy in the form of neutrons, they still have the blast and heat effects of a 'regular' nuclear bomb, so anything that's within the radius is fucked either way.

[(USA)Bruce]

So its nothing near like the neutron weapons we see in generals right?

Like a short term radiation (Then again theres no such thing with radiation it keeps on giving)


So what could be the use of such a weapon if you could clear cities armoured batallions yet do nothing with it when its fully of radition poisoned dead people?

Why not simply nuke it?

[The_Hunter]

^ because it has a much smaller explosion but likely an equaly large kill radius basicly.

Ontop of that most modern day battle tanks and armored vehicles are well protected against radiation and bio or chemical weapons.
Protection against the intense radiation of a neutron bomb is as far as i know close to impossible.

[piratep2r]

(Then again theres no such thing with radiation it keeps on giving)

This is not practically true, even if it is technically true. After all, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perfectly habitable, lived in cities now.

Yes, a half life predicts how long as isotope takes to decay; so with one half life, it is now 50% as radioactive as it was initially, with 2, 25%, with 3, 12.5%… you can see it never goes down to zero exactly, but in a short number of half-lives it can go down to a manageable level.

The problem is that the half-life for any particular isotope can be quite long. If the half-life of the imaginary isotope above was 10 years, and you determined that 10 half-lives worth of decay was enough (99.9+% gone), then 100 years later you'd be ready to live there… or maybe your great grandkids would. Even though the radiation wouldn't have completely gone away, it would have been reduced to the background radiation level of our planet - after all, it is radioactive (a little), everywhere.

So, to add to that, different radioactive byproducts (like from an atomic explosion) have different half-lives, so you need to know what is around before you can predict how long it will stay radioactive.

Here is a list of radioactive byproducts and their decay rates. They range from tiny fractions of a second (essentially decaying instantly to nothing) to thousands of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radio...es_by_half-life. I didn't actually find the list easy to apply, but it is interesting.

When an atomic weapon explodes, there is both initial radiation which is released at the instant it explodes (and which does terrible damage to cells, and therefor bodies) and residual radiation from radioactive byproducts of the explosion. This is in addition to a conventional energy release (explosion). It is possible to build bombs with different ratios of these outputs.

Here is a link to the city of hiroshima's explanation of why it is safe to live there, and the difference between the different types of radiation (super simplified): http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/kids/KPSH...question12.html

So, all that brings us to Neutron Bombs. In short, they do noy simply kill everything and then go away; they are significantly worse than regular H bombs due to side effects of the fact that they are designed to produce nuetrons. Nuetrons go right through armor (and dirt) but do damage to living cells, so they can kill people in tanks, in bunkers, etc. The_Hunter is right, there don't seem to be many ways to protect against them. The problem is that in producing nuetrons, these bombs produce more (not less) long-lasting residual radiation in the form of long-half-life radioactive byproducts. So while they are tuned to maximize neutron production (specific type of initial radiation) and minimize blast effect, they still have a significant conventional energy release (explosion no less than 1 kt per wikipedia) and a worsened residual radiation effect as a byproduct of producing the neutrons. There is no free lunch, unfortunately.

For a really clear explanation of how they work, look at this:
http://lofi.forum.physorg.com/How-does-a-n...work_12207.html

You will have to scroll down a few posts to Carbonlife's post, but it is a good one.

Sorry for wall of text,

P

This post has been edited by piratep2r: 2 Dec 2012, 0:32

[MARS]

So its nothing near like the neutron weapons we see in generals right?

Like a short term radiation (Then again theres no such thing with radiation it keeps on giving)

So what could be the use of such a weapon if you could clear cities armoured batallions yet do nothing with it when its fully of radition poisoned dead people?

Why not simply nuke it?

They're different from the ZH neutron bombs because those don't actually cause any damage whereas the real one -would- level structures within its immediate blast radius and set stuff on fire just like any other nuclear weapon, with the added bonus of releasing an initial burst of neutron radiation for extra lethality. You could drop it on a city to wipe out a bunch of tanks and it'd probably accomplish that more effectively than a 'normal' nuke of the same size. Tanks are relatively well protected against blast and thermal effects (as long as it's not literally dead centre, obviously), but a neutron bomb would be able to get through their armour and kill the crew. As for the hypothetical situation where you have a bunch of rad-poisoned people in the city, they'd either die due to the regular effects of a nuke OR the neutron radiation. After all, being irradiated does not make you 'immune' to more radiation and the neutrons basically sweep through your body, wipe out your DNA, dissolve your bone marrow, blood vessels etc. It's basically the effects of radiation poisoning in fast-motion, depending on how much you absorb.

[Shiro]

There's a reason the Soviets have their tanks outfitted with barrels everywhere, because the liquids in these manage to absorb fast neutrons somewhat effectively. Otherwise it's correct that conventional tank armour is useless against them.

[Darky]

If you mean the kind of "Neutron Bomb" that focuses on intense radiation and less on the nuclear explosion itself, you mean salted bomb, which was never used (duh) and not sure if it was tested either, but the fallout is so bad that I don't think it was.