Are They Useless? VIII. A New (Better?) Idea for a Nuclear Weapon
A new approach to making nuclear weapons that weren’t useless appeared in what the great weapons designer Ted Taylor called “third generation nuclear weapons.”
According to Taylor, the first generation of nuclear weapons was the fission weapons like those used by us on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The second generation was the vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapons, the “hydrogen bombs” that neither we nor anyone else has yet used and that some have come to suspect are unusable because of their size.
The third generation, he said, was nuclear devices that were designed to select out certain of the “several dozen types of energy that are released from an exploding nuclear weapon” and focus them in a particular direction. Ordinary nuclear bombs, like ordinary conventional bombs, do their damage—their “prompt” damage, anyway--more or less equally in all directions. Third generation nuclear weapons would be designed to do their damage in a particular direction. Like a gun. More like an artillery piece maybe.
In 1958, a weapons designer from Los Alamos named Sam Cohen, on a visit to our second weapons design laboratory, Livermore National Laboratory in northern California, got an idea for a nuclear weapon that could produce a big blast of neutrons and focus it in a particular direction. To do this, we wouldn’t need a big explosive yield, it turned out. In fact we would need not to have a big explosive yield--only about the equivalent of one thousand tons of TNT (huge for a conventional bomb but ten to twenty times less than the yield of the first atomic bombs). The device would also need to be exploded high in the air, which meant that its heat and blast wouldn’t do as much damage on the ground as a thousand tons of TNT would on the ground.
The blast of neutrons, even though you wouldn’t feel them when they hit you, would be what did the most damage.
Neutrons are always generated in nuclear chain reactions. They are particles from the nuclei of atoms that have no electrical charge and are thus highly penetrating. Within a thousand yards or so from the burst, the neutrons from this new kind of weapon would pass right through most materials (the shells of tanks, say, or the walls of bunkers or buildings) and through the people inside them. The structures, if they hadn’t been affected by the one kiloton blast—would remain intact. But as the neutrons passed through people, they would kill them right away if the dose was powerful enough or, at lower doses, disable or cause them to die later because of damage to their gastrointestinal and neurological systems. The heat and blast damage to structures would be much less severe than for nuclear explosions with bigger yields. The collateral damage to people not specifically targeted—not in the line of fire, so to speak—should also be less widespread.
Well, then, might this solve the problem some Europeans had with having our “tactical” nuclear weapons in Europe? Didn’t this new device give us a bang that was small enough and focussed enough to eliminate, or reduce anyway, the problem of collateral damage? Was this the consummation devoutly to be wished?
Cohen found he had trouble selling the idea. Our military has never cottoned to the idea of radiation weapons, it seems. For quite a while, our military hadn’t even admitted that the ionizing radiation produced by the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had killed and injured significant numbers of people in Japan. If you had a weapon that did its damage primarily with radiation, that cat would be out of the bag.
Maybe radiation seemed too much like poison gas, or something. Which had been outlawed after World War I. Not as predictable in its effects as blast and heat. Not as dramatic. Not “kinetic” enough.
But this new device does offer new “tactical” possibilities, doesn’t it? A great improvement for sure on the high-though-somewhat-lower-yield “tactical” weapons we’d put in Europe to defend it from an attack by Soviet forces.
The Europeans didn’t go for the idea of the new kind of weapon either, it seems. The weapons might cause less damage to structures and civilians in Europe than our other “tactical” nuclear weapons would. But it would still cause some and, more importantly, might it make us more inclined to use both these weapons (if we had them) and other kinds of nuclear weapons?
These “enhanced radiation weapons” were, after all, still nuclear weapons. Wouldn’t the use of one of these third generation weapons open the door to the use of first and second generation nuclear weapons?
You can see that a weapon of this kind could be appealing to a country like Israel. If Israel were to be invaded, as it has been twice by now by its neighbors, how were they supposed to use any “tactical” nuclear weapons they might or might not have inside their own small territory? Their only option would be to use their nuclear weapons inside other countries.
Neutron bombs could be used inside Israel though, right? Provided the enemy didn’t have nuclear weapons too. Israel has been trying to make sure they never would.
In the United States, we did build up quite a stockpile of these “enhanced radiation weapons.” Edward Teller had convinced the Nixon administration that they might be used to defend against incoming ballistic missile warheads. For some reason, the many scientists who had serious doubts about this weren’t getting the kind of hearing Teller was.
A very expensive anti-ballistic missile system that used enhanced radiation warheads, called Safeguard, was developed. A site for it was built in North Dakota, with another planned for Washington, D.C. After a year or so, the site in North Dakota was shut down. The one planned to for Washington D.C. didn’t get off the drawing boards.
It’s not clear whether we ever did deploy any neutron bombs in Europe even though it did seem they might help with the problem of using “tactical” nuclear weapons on the territory of countries we were claiming to protect.
In any case, by 1996, all the enhanced radiation weapons we had built had been dismantled.
Here again is what it comes down to, as I see it. A tactical weapon, including a neutron bomb, is still a nuclear weapon. And any use of a nuclear weapon of any size or kind opens the door to the use of any nuclear weapon.
How is that door, once opened, to be closed?
Which also makes all other “tactical” nuclear weapons useless, no matter how small their yields.
What do you think?
Next: Are They Useless? IX. If We Had Them, Why Didn't We Use Them ?