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It depends on your answer to the question, is nuclear war inevitable? If it is, making weapons that are as clean as possible is a reasonable goal. If you get s
by jtriangle 2y ago
It depends on your answer to the question, is nuclear war inevitable?
If it is, making weapons that are as clean as possible is a reasonable goal. If you get some knowledge that's applicable elsewhere, that's a nice bonus.
If you don't think it's inevitable, you can likely justify making them cleaner because it will likely have applications elsewhere by the logic of fusion weapons being the only place we've been able to harvest usable energy thusfar.
- SaberTail 2y agoThe difficulty with "clean fusion bombs" is that bomb makers can always increase the yield of a fusion bomb by making it dirty. Fusion releases neutrons, and these neutrons have enough energy to fission the common 238 isotope of uranium, which releases roughly 100 times more energy than than the neutron started with.
- jtriangle 2y agoYes, but if you're getting the desired yield from fusion alone, you don't need to. Remember, most of the world is focused on relatively small nuclear arms, not world ending polymegaton devices