? Don’t neutrons leave the architechture and expend the personnel?
“? Don’t neutrons leave the architechture and expend the personnel?”
Yes.
And (on the very long odds) if Israel used one, it would be a way
to send a message “Scientists of the world: don’t help rogue regimes”.
And I’ve got to eat crow if Wikipedia is correct.
Sounds like Reagan revived the neutron bomb program; all have now
been destroyed/moved from US inventory. I INCORRECTLY thought Carter
had stopped production and it wasn’t resumed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb
Development was subsequently cancelled by President Jimmy Carter
in 1978, but again restarted by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.[3]
Three types were built by the United States[4]. The W66 warhead
for the anti-ICBM Sprint missile system was produced and deployed
in the mid 70s and retired soon thereafter along with the missile system.
The W70 Mod 3 warhead was developed for the short-range, tactical Lance
missile, and the W79 Mod 0 was developed for artillery shells.
The latter two types were retired by President George Bush in 1992
due to the end of the Cold War.[5][6] The last W70 Mod 3 warhead was
dismantled in 1996[7], and the last remaining neutron bomb (W79 Mod 0)
was dismantled by 2003 when the dismantling of all W79 variants was
completed.[8].
No, that is a popularly misunderstood myth. A neutron bomb produces a conventional fission explosion about the size of that used on Hiroshima from its primary. It is essentially a H-bomb with different casing and different ratios in the secondary. The secondary is designed to maximize neutron output that will kill in a ring around the primary explosion, leaving the infrastructure in that ring intact. It accomplishes this using super-cooled tritium gas instead of depleted uranium in the secondary “pencil.” This, and tritium’s 12-year half life, makes them considerably more expensive to maintain than your run-’o-the-mill H-bomb.
The advantage to this is that the x-rays and gamma-rays produced by the secondary are able to penetrate tank armor - even armor capable of surviving some of the blast itself. The same would apply to heavily-armored facilities as this one may have been. That is the real beauty of this weapon.
Hope that helps.