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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Carolyn who wrote (16959)	9/6/2002 8:15:36 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Respond to of 23908

Yes... And here is how it will play out.... THE neutron bomb, or enhanced radiation warhead, is the ultimate weapon for the misanthrope. It kills people in large numbers while doing minimal damage to real estate. The technology is now around to make them no bigger than a baseball, leading some analysts to warn that they could become the new weapon of terrorism. This is the weapon that reports from Britain claim Israel is preparing to use against an Iraqi city, should Baghdad deploy chemical or biological weapons against the Jewish state. A spin-off of the thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, neutron bombs were first developed by the US in 1963 and then the Soviet Union in the late '70s. They were primarily intended as a small-scale battlefield weapon. The US suspended development in 1978 under the Carter administration but resumed it under Reagan in 1981. In a normal thermonuclear weapon, half of the energy released is produced by the fusion of hydrogen isotopes, tritrium and deuterium. But this weapon is encased in a blanket of the uranium isotope 238 which after detonation produces the rest of the bomb's energy by fission. A neutron bomb does not have the blanket to produce the blast and the fast neutrons are released into the environment to kill living tissue. Because a neutron bomb has a ground zero blast area of only a few square metres, the idea was for them to be used as a deterrent against armored or infantry assault. They could be carried by a lance type missile, fired by a 200 millimetre gun or delivered by an aircraft. The bomb would disable enemy infantry or tank crews in minutes and those exposed would die within a few days. Strategically, their ideal use would be to destroy targets that are close to a site that a force wants to protect. For example, a bridge heavily guarded by enemy troops. A neutron bomb detonated near the bridge would kill the enemy troops guarding it without doing any significant damage to the bridge structure. One of the weapon's most valuable features is its effectiveness against tank attacks. Because neutrons are penetrative radiation, such a weapon could take out large numbers of tank crews simultaneously without destroying the tanks. Residual radiation is minimised, theoretically allowing the tanks to be salvaged by the attacking force." chss.montclair.edu