Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!cbnews!military From: natei@sco.COM (Nathaniel Ingersoll) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Neutron bombs Message-ID: <1990Nov6.044701.1729@cbnews.att.com> Date: 6 Nov 90 04:47:01 GMT References: <1990Nov2.201207.27374@cbnews.att.com> Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker) Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Lines: 26 Approved: military@att.att.com From: Nathaniel Ingersoll In article <1990Nov4.210816.4716@cbnews.att.com>, "Christian M. Restifo" writes: : :As for the Neutron bomb, all I know is that it's used to radiate the :hell out of your target. While the blast effects (destruction of :buildings, etc.) is considerably less than that of an H-bomb, the weapon :actually spews out a tremendous amount of radiation, killing every :living thing. (I've heard that the Neutron bomb was originally designed :to be used in the Middle East on the oil fields....) Neutron bombs are basically normal fission weapons with the U-238 jacket removed, to let the neutrons from the fission reaction go out and irradiate other stuff besides the U-238. In the case of a normal fission weapon, the primary idea of the bomb is to cause blast (overpressure) and heat destruction, so the bombs were designed not to send their immense numbers of neutrons out; so a jacket of U-238 was put around the entire thing to absorb the neutrons (of course, the U-238 gets vaporized just barely after it absorbs all of the neutrons, but the job was done). Later someone realized what all of those neutrons could do to people, and save all the good stuff (tanks, buildings, whatever), and so the neutron bomb was born. I believe that a good sized neutron bomb has an explosive yield on the order of a couple of kilotons (2-3 KT), as compared to 15 or 20KT for Fat Man and Little Boy.