In addition to the research and development of fission weapons during the Manhattan Project, theoretical work on the hydrogen bomb had also begun. The Hydrogen Bomb and the Manhattan Project Thus began the vast expansion of the nuclear weapons complex that eventually had operations in some thirty-two states.
Because of the increasing range of Soviet aircraft, the Commission ruled out expanding Hanford but preferred distant sites in the South and Ohio River region. du Pont de Nemours and Company, asking DuPont to undertake the design, construction and operation of a new site to produce plutonium and tritium, a necessary ingredient for the thermonuclear bomb. Nonetheless, on July 25, 1950, President Harry Truman wrote to Crawford H. At the time, David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had strong reservations about pursuing the “Super” or thermonuclear bomb.
#COBALT BOMB VS HYDROGEN BOMB SERIES#
The use of a salted bomb is a component to the plot of Frank Miller's graphic novel series The Dark Knight Returns.In January 1950, President Truman made the controversial decision to continue and intensify research and production of thermonuclear weapons.
#COBALT BOMB VS HYDROGEN BOMB MOVIE#
The 1970s movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes featured an atomic bomb that was hypothesized to use a cobalt casing. In the 1957 novel On the Beach by Nevil Shute, the death of all humanity is brought about by the detonation of cobalt bombs in the Northern Hemisphere. This concept is best known from the Soviet "Doomsday Device" in the 1964 satirical Cold War film Dr. The UK tested a 1 kiloton bomb incorporating a small amount of cobalt as an experimental radiochemical tracer at their Tadje testing site in Maralinga range, Australia, on September 14, 1957. Sodium-24 has also been proposed as a salting agent. Other radioactive isotopes that have been suggested for salted bombs include gold-198 ( 198Au), tantalum-182 ( 182Ta) and zinc-65 ( 65Zn). One example of a possible salted bomb would be a cobalt bomb, which would produce the radioactive isotope cobalt-60 ( 60Co). It would also have to have a chemistry that causes it to return to earth as fallout, rather than stay in the atmosphere after being vaporized in the explosion.
The radioactive isotope used for the fallout material would be a high intensity gamma ray emitter, with a half-life long enough that it remains lethal for an extended period. The energy yield from a salted weapon is usually lower than from an ordinary weapon of similar size as a consequence of these changes. Salted fission bombs can be made by replacing the neutron reflector between the fissionable core and the explosive layer with a metallic element. In a salted hydrogen bomb, the radiation case around the fusion fuel, which normally is made of some fissionable element, is replaced with a metallic salting element. The explosion scatters the resulting radioactive material over a wide area, leaving it uninhabitable far longer than an area affected by typical nuclear weapons. When the bomb explodes, the element absorbs neutrons released by the nuclear reaction, converting it to its radioactive form. Salted versions of both fission and fusion weapons can be made by surrounding the core of the explosive device with a material containing an element that can be converted to a highly radioactive isotope by neutron bombardment. A salted bomb is able to contaminate a much larger area than a dirty bomb.
Ī salted bomb should not be confused with a dirty bomb, which is an ordinary chemical explosive bomb containing radioactive material which is spread over the area when the bomb explodes. No salted bomb has ever been atmospherically tested, and as far as is publicly known none have ever been built. His intent was not to propose that such a weapon be built, but to show that nuclear weapon technology would soon reach the point where it could end human life on Earth. The idea originated with Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard, in February 1950. The term is derived both from the means of their manufacture, which involves the incorporation of additional elements to a standard atomic weapon, and from the expression "to salt the earth", meaning to render an area uninhabitable for generations. A salted bomb is a Radiological weapon designed to produce enhanced quantities of radioactive fallout, rendering a large area uninhabitable.
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