A “neutron bomb” has considerable blast. Its claim to fame was that it could penetrate gamma shielding on tanks, to stop a massive soviet tank invasion.
A typical “enhanced radiation weapon” of the time had an explosive yield of .3 to .5 kilotons- half a thousand tons of bang, or .5 x 1000 x 2000, about a million pounds TNT equivalent, or about 140 OKC bombs. Not a mere firecracker. If you were not in a shielded tank, the difference between a neutron bomb and a Davy Crockett warhead would be unnoticiable.
The Left hated them; they could stop a Communist attack on Europe. They invented the claim that a neutron bomb killed people but left structures alone, somehow making them less moral than a conventional bomb that destroyed both. This has become widely accepted as truth, mostly through repetition an dlack of any counter.
Some “neutron bomb” designs went up to several kilotons.
The supercollider can’t make any significant amount of fissionables, or even dangerous isotopes. The flux is simply too low. The particle energy is very high, you can make tiny amounts of some very exotic isotopes, but you’d never make a half gram of plutonium.
I don’t think a terrorist could use an accelerator to nefarious ends. Everything that happens is controlled, nothing is done without a test plan. It would be like using the telescope at Palomar as a solar hot dog cooker, too many people would be involved to be able to do it secretly.
Sabotage, for sure, though.
“Assassination targets including the president and interior minister were also on the list.”
Not only can't the LHC produce non-significant amounts of isotopes, it cannot produce any isotopes. Hadrons = heavy particles, e.g. protons and neutrons (vs. Leptons = light particles, e.g. electrons).
They collide protons at speeds near the speed of light. Which collisions produce a number of other elementary particles - but no isotopes (actual atoms). It is just on another (smaller) scale.
Whatever nefarious plans this guy had, they had nothing to do with CERN as such. Unless he planned to sabotage the LHC, which would be costly but non-destructive beyond that.