Doomsday device

[Giotto]

While rummaging through a seldom used closet in my house, I found a copy of the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records. I was glancing through it and I saw a section on the largest man made explosions ever and nuclear arsenals and such. It had a side bar that said:

"No official estimate has been published of the potential power of the device known as Doomsday, but this far surpasses any tested weapon. If it were practicable to construct, it is speculated that a 50,000-megaton cobalt-salted device could wipe out the entire human race except people who were deep underground and did not emerge for more than five years"



What the heck are they talking about?? Did someone actually propose constructing one of those and what is it? Just a giant nuke?? I've only heard of "doomsday devices" in movies!

 

[Gladi]

Bright day
I do not know about such device. But I heard (seen in historic document) that soviets built armageddon nuke (Ivan?) during one part of war, but later deconstructed it. I cannot offer any evidence though.

 

[Azadre]

50Giga ton eh? It wouldn't destroy the human species

 

[addiv]

Sounds odd. I've only heard about a Doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, maybe someone from the Guinness book editorship had a lugubrious sense of humor. Or maybe they're talking about the neutron bomb, but that seems unlikely. My 1989 edition says nothing about it.

 

[stratego]

50 Gigaton= 50,000,000,000 tons = 10,000,000,000,000 lbs

there are 5billion people on earth, that means 20,000 lb per person. I can barely bench press half that weight, think what would happen if other people have that much weight on them, they'll die.

 

[Perfection]

Well, te idea is too get the nuetrons produced in the reaction to create a large amount of very short-lived radioactive isotopes and spread it acrsoss the world killing everyone with the fallout. There is no mention of any being built and it would be impractical.

Note: This is based on 10 minutes of research, take it with a grain of salt.

 

[KaNick]

I think I heard something about this on a History Channel show. It was a Russian design made so that if Russia was ever destroyed it would take the rest of the world with it. I think it was Kruschav(sp) or someone with a similar name who turned it down because it was run by computers and he did not trust it. It was meant to be built into the hull of a boat.

 

[HamaticBabylon]

Maybe the World governments want to destroy the "good" people so they can continue there evil plans for world domination!

 

[Enkidu Warrior]

http://www.rense.com/general40/dooms.htm

The idea of the cobalt bomb originated with Leo Szilard who publicized it in Feb. 1950, not as a serious proposal for weapon, but to point out that it would soon be possible in principle to build a weapon that could kill everybody on earth. To design such a theoretical weapon a radioactive isotope is needed that can be dispersed world wide before it decays. Such dispersal takes many months to a few years so the half-life of Co-60 is ideal.

The Co-60 fallout hazard is greater than the fission products from a U-238 blanket because

many fission-produced isotopes have half-lives that are very short, and thus decay before the fallout settles or can be protected against by short-term sheltering;

many fission-produced isotopes have very long half-lives and thus do not produce very intense radiation;
the fission products are not radioactive at all.

The half-life of Co-60 on the other hand is long enough to settle out before significant decay has occurred, and to make it impractical to wait out in shelters, yet is short enough that intense radiation is produced.

Initially gamma radiation fission products from an equivalent size fission-fusion-fission bomb are much more intense than Co-60: 15,000 times more intense at 1 hour; 35 times more intense at 1 week; 5 times more intense at 1 month; and about equal at 6 months. Thereafter fission drops off rapidly so that Co-60 fallout is 8 times more intense than fission at 1 year and 150 times more intense at 5 years. The very long lived isotopes produced by fission would overtake the again Co-60 after about 75 years.

Zinc has been proposed as an alternate candidate for the "doomsday role". The advantage of Zn-64 is that its faster decay leads to greater initial intensity. Disadvantages are that since it makes up only half of natural zinc, it must either be isotopically enriched or the yield will be cut in half; that it is a weaker gamma emitter than Co-60, putting out only one-fourth as many gammas for the same molar quantity; and that substantially amounts will decay during the world-wide dispersal process. Assuming pure Zn-64 is used, the radiation intensity of Zn-65 would initially be twice as much as Co-60. This would decline to being equal in 8 months, in 5 years Co-60 would be 110 times as intense.

Militarily useful radiological weapons would use local (as opposed to world-wide) contamination, and high initial intensities for rapid effects. Prolonged contamination is also undesirable. In this light Zn-64 is possibly better suited to military applications than cobalt, but probably inferior to tantalum or gold. As noted above ordinary "dirty" fusion-fission bombs have very high initial radiation intensities and must also be considered radiological weapons.

No cobalt or other salted bomb has ever been atmospherically tested, and as far as is publicly known none have ever been built. In light of the ready availability of fission-fusion-fission bombs, it is unlikely any special-purpose fallout contamination weapon will ever be developed.

The British did test a bomb that incorporated cobalt as an experimental radiochemical tracer (Antler/Round 1, 14 September 1957). This 1 kt device was exploded at the Tadje site, Maralinga range, Australia. The experiment was regarded as a failure and not repeated.

Well, let us hope that Doomsday Weapons are never built. With enough H-Bombs, we could come
close to a D-Weapon. A Doomsday weapon would not be just a WMD, but a WTD (Weapon of Total Destruction).

Now that efforts for non-proliferation of these nuclear weapons are underway, and with more countries trying to get into the nuclear party, the doomsday cloud looms once again. Let us hope no nation anywhere on earth, threatens humanity with such WTDs.

"The world we've made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking" -- Albert Einstein.

 

[crystal]

Why not use many smaller nukes instead? Destruction would spread far more evenly on Earth and kill huge majority of people. Whee.

 

[Perfection]

Well, that's probobly how you would need to do it, a whole bunch of salted nukes would create the fallout needed, it would difficult to get one of the magnitude required built.

 

[CurtSibling]

Why solve the world's troubles, when we can just cop out and blow the place up?

 

[Perfection]

Originally posted by CurtSibling
Why solve the world's troubles, when we can just cop out and blow the place up?

Exactly. Let's blow up the damned planet and be done with it

 

[steviejay]

Originally posted by Azadre
50Giga ton eh? It wouldn't destroy the human species

it'd probably hurt like hell though......

I remember reading somewhere once that someone had designed or was designing a nuclear bomb which would cause the world to split? Is that the bomb you're talking about?

If you's are going to blow the world up, could you's maybe give me prior warning so I can take my girlfriend someplace safe so that when its safe to emerge we can come out and begin the "long and tedious" process of repopulating the planet

 

[Akka]

Guys...
50 Gigatons, do you just imagine what it is ?
The biggest nuke that was even thought of was 100 Megaton, which means 0,2 % of the power of this device...

Originally posted by stratego
there are 5billion people on earth, that means 20,000 lb per person. I can barely bench press half that weight

You mean you can bench-press 5 tons ? Not so bad

 

[Enkidu Warrior]

This hypothetical bomb is not intended to "blow up" everyone on the planet, but to release enough intense gamma rays to turn everyone into glowing gunge. Though it goes without saying that a 50 gigaton explosion would probably leave quite a dent wherever it was detonated.

 

[IglooDame]

Originally posted by Enkidu Warrior
This hypothetical bomb is not intended to "blow up" everyone on the planet, but to release enough intense gamma rays to turn everyone into glowing gunge. Though it goes without saying that a 50 gigaton explosion would probably leave quite a dent wherever it was detonated.

And (as the folks keeping track of potential asteroid collisions keep telling us) it doesn't necessarily require radiation to do what the blast itself won't; a detonation releasing that much energy might throw up enough debris into the atmosphere to cause a 'simple' destruction of Earth's climate - the would just be icing on the WTD cake.

 

[Grav]

Actually there was going to be a "doomsday" device. As someone mentioned earlier, it was to be built by the Soviets. A simple nuclear device was to be placed on a boat that went on random courses in the icey northern waters of Russia. The "doomsday" part comes in here... they would have loaded the ship with *****loads* of extra nuclear crap (fissionable materal?, correct me if I'm wrong) to make the intial explosion go all insane and intensify. However it was decided not to be built, thankfully.