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Comment by saboot | Hacker News Reader

The only upper limit on the destructive power of a nuclear weapons is the carrying capacity of the delivery mechanism.

The explosive yield of the Tsar Bomba was purposefully reduced considerably, the fallout from a full yield test was too much even for the Soviets.

There's always the option of putting the energy released into a radiation pulse as opposed to explosion. A bomb which takes out a few blocks, but whose radiation kills for miles and miles.

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The explosive yield of the Tsar Bomba was purposefully reduced considerably, the fallout from a full yield test was too much even for the Soviets.

Yes. This is because in the full yield version, you double the yield by adding a jacket of Uranium that is fissioned by neutrons from the fusion reaction. That makes it a very dirty extra 50MT, distributing those hot Uranium fission products far and wide.

There's always the option of putting the energy released into a radiation pulse as opposed to explosion. A bomb which takes out a few blocks, but whose radiation kills for miles and miles.

Really? I've never heard of that. Fascinating. Can you go into more detail?

Kind of strange. I've done a lot of digging into nukes (as an amateur) and no one mentioned the radiation pulse tradeoff.

Probably something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb

This is a terrifying weapon to me, because it's specifically designed to destroy only the people and organic life so the infrastructure can be reused.

So arguably much closer to dropping infantry, except that you'd have to warn them if you don't want to kill civilians.

Yes, it is.

But it seems to had another use. The W66 warhead has been used in the Sprint anti ballistic missile, to intercept and destroy ICBM.

I've always wondered: reused- by whom? Assuming these things would be droppped during a nuclear war (otherwise, dropping one would start the nuclear war) there wouldn't be many people left to reuse the buildings. Or any other living things for that matter.

> I've always wondered: reused- by whom?

Future archeologists.

>Neutron activation from the explosions could make many building materials in the city radioactive, such as zinc coated steel/galvanized steel (see area denial use below).

After you!

That's not really the intent. Mostly the idea was that the armor on a tank will do a good job protecting from the blast and heat but a poor job protecting against neutrons. So if you want a weapon to attack an column of armor you're better off having your warhead put as much of its energy into neutrons as possible.

Really, bombarding things with neutrons is not what you want to do if you want to re-use something. Some elements become radioactive when they absorb a neutron and if if you want to re-use that infrastructure you'd probably be better off letting it take some blast and then repairing it.

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