So that's fission, so you're going to have fission products, which are bad for you, and vaporized unconsumed fissile material, which is also bad for you. Neutrons will also be absorbed into stable isotopes and induce them to be radioactive.
pure fusion
Fusion also emits neutrons. You're not just using a nuke for a bigger boom, you want the neutrons because they will change the isotopes in the incoming warhead and disable it. The purpose of the weapon is inseparable from the hazard.
And you're gonna kill everyone in nearby air planes. And then there's the EMP and shockwave effects, depending on altitude. And this is all assuming the airburst works and it doesn't just land in a metro area and kill a million people outright. Or that no one steals one of them because instead of central warhead storage you're gonna have these things deployed at hundreds of sites around the country on active ready with minimum wage flunkies fingering the buttons.
It's a weapon that can never be used. What would global politics have to look like before we're like "yeah lets have 18 year olds stationed around the country able to fire nukes the moment anything in the sky looks weird". At that point I'd much prefer a preemptive counter-force strike from the submarines.
The weapons are actually derived from the 1970s and 80s research into neutron bombs. The reason the primaries are compressed and pumped via external neutron sources is to greatly reduce the amount of fission fuel - meaning very little gets vaporized in the blast (so little that the ground area under the blast is safe after a few hours), and almost all of the energy comes from lithium-6 deuteride fusion. The blasts are also relatively small - a few kilotons (about a third of a Nagasaki) and are meant to go off thousands of feet in the air, safely away from the ground and high enough to not start fires. While the neutron pulse is slowed by an external casing of moderator (beryllium lined graphite AFAIK) to reduce the range and potency of the neutron radiation output. There would still be some significant compton scattering and so a modest EMP would be present, but we're talking a choice of "oh no my iphone got fried" vs "oh hey that Chinese ICBM with a 4MT warhead just blew up in my face" the choice is pretty clear.
So that's fission, so you're going to have fission products, which are bad for you, and vaporized unconsumed fissile material, which is also bad for you. Neutrons will also be absorbed into stable isotopes and induce them to be radioactive.
Fusion also emits neutrons. You're not just using a nuke for a bigger boom, you want the neutrons because they will change the isotopes in the incoming warhead and disable it. The purpose of the weapon is inseparable from the hazard.
And you're gonna kill everyone in nearby air planes. And then there's the EMP and shockwave effects, depending on altitude. And this is all assuming the airburst works and it doesn't just land in a metro area and kill a million people outright. Or that no one steals one of them because instead of central warhead storage you're gonna have these things deployed at hundreds of sites around the country on active ready with minimum wage flunkies fingering the buttons.
It's a weapon that can never be used. What would global politics have to look like before we're like "yeah lets have 18 year olds stationed around the country able to fire nukes the moment anything in the sky looks weird". At that point I'd much prefer a preemptive counter-force strike from the submarines.
The weapons are actually derived from the 1970s and 80s research into neutron bombs. The reason the primaries are compressed and pumped via external neutron sources is to greatly reduce the amount of fission fuel - meaning very little gets vaporized in the blast (so little that the ground area under the blast is safe after a few hours), and almost all of the energy comes from lithium-6 deuteride fusion. The blasts are also relatively small - a few kilotons (about a third of a Nagasaki) and are meant to go off thousands of feet in the air, safely away from the ground and high enough to not start fires. While the neutron pulse is slowed by an external casing of moderator (beryllium lined graphite AFAIK) to reduce the range and potency of the neutron radiation output. There would still be some significant compton scattering and so a modest EMP would be present, but we're talking a choice of "oh no my iphone got fried" vs "oh hey that Chinese ICBM with a 4MT warhead just blew up in my face" the choice is pretty clear.