Sorry Everybody (POLITICAL)

[Couture]

Couture...little science lesson here....and I'm not trying to be condescenging, I'm just trying to explain it so people understand.

You can't even spell it, so how can you be it.

Thermonuclear explosions don't use atomic bombs to start off the reaction. Since we have conventional explosive (if you know what you're doing you can actually make the stuff with about 30 dollars in common grocery items), there is no need to use the atomic bomb to start the implosion, and there is, therefore, no radiation in it.

Oh no! I've just been attacked by a bullshit bomb. Hey, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Select too, but that doesn't mean I know how to build a nuclear bomb. And I sure am glad that the terrorists don't have access to our grocery stores.

But for your information, Thermonuclear bombs involve large amounts of radiation and fall-out. Didn't you watch the "Radiated Zombies from Hell"?

By the way, please be sure to let all the scientists know about your 'clean' nuclear discovery. I'm sure they would be happy to convert all the nuclear power plants in the world over to your new 'clean' method. Then they won't have to worry about that whole nuclear waste problem anymore.

And lastly, even if you could come up with a 'clean' bomb, how are you going to make sure every other country with a nuke uses clean bombs too?

 

[The_Darkness]

Courture, actually--spelling errors aside---we have a clean nuclear reactor which utilizes fusion power instead of fission power. It's called the Tokamak reactor. Japan has one too. They've been up and running since about 1997. Let's try to keep up.

Oh dear Christ! I forgot about Radiated Zombies from Hell! Do they spread the zombie plague too!?! I should probably kill my friend....he could have leprosy, or he could be a zombie! Oh the Humanity!

Seriously. Next time you try to use a movie in a "clever" quip, smart ass or otherwise, at least make it a real movie.

Any idiot who passes 7th grade science can make a thermonuke. It's just a simple matter of having a sufficently supplied metalshop. You know; lathe, drill press, metal foundry, and a wire welder. There are so many recipies for homemade C-4 on the internet that you can chop down a small forest just to print them out. Most of them actually work.

Please....step aside. If you don't know the science, don' t try to dispute it with non-existant cheesy movies and little tag lines. This was almost a serious discussion until you popped in.

Oh, one more thing. The advantage (if you'd bothered to read the previous posts, you'd have noticed this) of using a small thermonuke is that there is NO NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE IN EXPLOSION OR DAMAGE IF THE USER PROPERLY BUILDS THE BOMB FOR LOW YEILDS. There would be no distinguishable difference except instead of dropping a 2000 pound bomb from an airplane, a soldier walks in with a 10 pound canister, sets it, and runs like hell for the next city block.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

I think it would help if your point about the negligibly-low or no radiation nuclear weapon could be buttressed by some corroborating evidence--for fairness's sake. I tried looking up things about nuclear weapons, online, but nothing I found related to your assertion.

Near as I ever knew (which is as much as any lay person, and far less than a proper Physicist), all nuclear weaponry contributed fall-out to some degree.

I do agree to the simplicity of a nuclear weapon, though. I attended a seminar on scientific ethics, once, and part of it was discussing how a nuclear weapon (and a variety of types) could be made from reasonably easy-to-aquire parts and what parts were not reasonably easy to aquire could be made with a basic understanding of high school physics and proper tools.

 

[Couture]

Courture, actually--spelling errors aside---we have a clean nuclear reactor which utilizes fusion power instead of fission power. It's called the Tokamak reactor. Japan has one too. They've been up and running since about 1997. Let's try to keep up.

1997 huh?
http://www.cnn.com/US/9704/05/fusion.confusion/

Please....step aside. If you don't know the science, don' t try to dispute it with non-existant cheesy movies and little tag lines. This was almost a serious discussion until you popped in.

That would be a joke.

Oh, one more thing. The advantage (if you'd bothered to read the previous posts, you'd have noticed this) of using a small thermonuke is that there is NO NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE IN EXPLOSION OR DAMAGE IF THE USER PROPERLY BUILDS THE BOMB FOR LOW YEILDS. There would be no distinguishable difference except instead of dropping a 2000 pound bomb from an airplane, a soldier walks in with a 10 pound canister, sets it, and runs like hell for the next city block.

Wrong. Comparing a chemical reaction to a nuclear reaction is just wrong. Sure you can build a nuke to have a small amount of heat and destructive energy. Doing so releases radiation. It also opens pandora's box and that is a box I would prefer to stay closed.

 

[fifty5]

Hydrogen bombs--big bastards under go the opposite process. They have shape charges that cause an implosion instead of an explosion. This implosion forces many Hydrogen atoms together and they fuse into Helium atoms. The energy put off by this is huge.

This process is called Fusion. In the pure process, there is no radiation because nothing is being broken up and there aren't loose sub-atomic and atomic particles. However, until about the late 1960's the only explosive we had that was powerful enough to cause this explosion was an atomic bomb. Atomic bombs were used to set off the initial reaction a split second before the Fusion reaction went off. Lots of radiation, very dirty bombs.

Thermonuclear explosions don't use atomic bombs to start off the reaction. Since we have conventional explosive (if you know what you're doing you can actually make the stuff with about 30 dollars in common grocery items), there is no need to use the atomic bomb to start the implosion, and there is, therefore, no radiation in it.

Like Joe, my brief search didn't find the relevant info, so I can't cite a reference for my first point, which is based on memory...

The_Darkness is basically correct, but the devil is in the detail. While "the pure process" of fusing hydrogen into helium doesn't produce so-called 'ionising radiation' (X-rays and subatomic particles), the energy produced by that reaction is great enough to enable other reactions as well, which do produce ionising radiation and, I think, subatomic particles as well. Conversion of H to He isn't perfectly complete: some of the atoms are simply blasted apart into electrons, protons (and neutrons, if they still use 'heavy hydrogen': deuterium.) Unlike fission, those are minority byproducts, not the main process, but, IIRC, ionising radiation is produced.

Being a pedant, I'd also like to point out that although not 'ionising radiation' the heat and light produced by fusion are also radiation, just the longer wavelengths: ultra violet, visible and infra red. The 'ionising' stuff is the even shorter wavelengths, such as X-rays.

Finally, some conjecture. Any bomb, chemical or nuclear, with an output equivalent to 300 tons of TNT ("0.3 kilotons") - the "small" thermo-nuclear devices like the B61(Mk-61) (see: http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear/weapontypes.htm ) is an indescriminate mass destruction weapon. Compare 0.3 kilotons with the 3.9 kilotons that were used to destroy Dresden in WW2. (For further comparison, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 25 kilotons each.)

"3,900 tonnes of bombs were dropped. Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. An area of 15 square kilometers was totally destroyed, among that: 14,000 homes, 72 schools, 22 hospitals, 19 churches, 5 theaters, 50 bank and insurance companies, 31 department stores, 31 large hotels, and 62 administration buildings.

The precise number of dead is difficult to ascertain and is not known. Numbers vary from 35,000 to 135,000 dead. There have been larger estimates for the number of dead, ranging as high as a quarter of a million, but they are from disputed sources, primarily the Nazi Propaganda Ministry and holocaust denier David Irving. The Nazis made use of Dresden in their propaganda and promised swift retaliation. " (See: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/911999/posts )

The ratio between Dresden and the B61 is 13:1. Dividing the Dresden destruction by 13 gives over 1,000 homes, 5 schools, 2 hospitals, 1.5 churches, 4 banks and insurance companies. 2.5 department stores and the same number of large hotels, plus 4.5 administration buildings that would be "totally destroyed". (Sorry about using fractions with 'totally', but that awkwardness doesn't affect the WMD issue.)

The_Darkness may be right that 1 kiloton devices (rather than the 300 of the B61) have been produced, but I thought that fusion likes to be big. That's why the sun works so well.

A ban on fusion grenades sounds to me more like something easy to agree because no-one could actually build one, rather than implying that they exist.

Eff (no longer a scientist, but still maths/science literate)