![]() Atomic Rockets has a long section on this in the " Conventional Weapons" page.Ī quick summary, nuclear weapons can be used to drive a "shotgun" and accelerate pellets to 100km/sec.Ī nuclear shaped charge can drive a stream of liquid metal at speeds approaching 3% cĪ Casaba Howitzer can use the energy to create and drive a spindle of plasma at up to 10% cįinally, a nuclear explosion could be used to power an X-ray laser which sends a coherent beam at the speed of light at the target.ĭriving ultra high speed devices makes targeting much simpler (very little lead time), and provides massive amounts of kinetic and thermal energy on the target on impact. On the other hand, nuclear weapons can be used as compact, high energy sources to power other weapons systems. While much smaller and "cleaner" than a conventional fusion weapon, it will still release a great deal of energy in the form of neutrons and x rays, so there will still be radiation effects.Īs noted, there are many reasons not to use massively powerful WMDs in modern war (even strategic weapons today are thought to have yields limited to 300Kt). The only practical way to initiate a "pure" fusion explosion would be to use a small quantity of antimatter to initiate the fusion reaction (possibly by using a small amount of antimatter the centre of a sphere of Lithium Hydride and using explosive lenses to collapse the fusion fuel onto the antimatter). How do you think such a weapon would affect modern warfare? Such a weapon might actully be cheaper than cruise missiles since they won't need to be very precise and the raw material (hydrogen isotopes) are cheaper to produce than what s needed for a fission bomb. Your enemy is moving his fleet close to your borders? Just throw a clean fusion bomb and sink the entire fleet.Ī terrorist group is hiding in the ruins of a city? Just throw a few fusion bombs in a row to completely flatten that area. The first country to gain access to such a bomb would have a tremendous tactical advantage. If we manage to create a pure fusion bomb that doesn't need a fission bomb to ignite, then we would have a "clean" hydrogen bomb. That s why we say that nukes are "dirty". The fission bomb produces lots of radioactive waste. The fission bomb is like a lighting match that s needed to trigger the more powerful fusion reaction. Currently most Nukes are actually thermonuclear fusion bombs ignited by a fission (uranium or plutoniom) bomb.
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