Weapon
of Total Destruction
It
might help put the Weapon of Mass Destruction debate into perspective to keep
in mind that it's entirely possible to build a single nuclear weapon which
will kill all human life on the surface of the Earth. The idea may sound a
bit far fetched, but that doesn't affect the physics.The basic principle involves wrapping a gigaton range nuclear warhead in cobalt, which upon warhead detonation becomes radioactive and is then globally dispersed by the jet stream. Since the largest nuclear warhead detonated to date could have been boosted to a tenth of a gigaton, and as there is no theoretical upper limit to the size of a thermonuclear warhead, a gigaton range device is obviously feasible, particularly given that it would be stationary.
As a rough sizing exercise, assume a target gamma radiation dose of 10 Sieverts/year, which should be sufficient to guarantee 100% global lethality. Radiation poisoning being what it is, the living would envy the dead. But not for long. Anyhoo, a Google search turns up that the dose rate due to external irradiation from uniform contamination of the ground by 137Cs is 1.6 x 10-12 Sv hr-1 Bq-1 m3. Assuming concentration at the surface and neglecting the conservative effect that gamma emission of cobalt 60 is of appreciably higher energy than that of Cesium 137 and would occur at or near
the surface, factoring in that cobalt 60 has a specific activity of 42 TBq/g
we get a total required uniformly dispersed isotope count on the order of
8.8 x 10^31. Which sounds like a lot, but when you divide it out it's only
around 19 million pounds, which amounts to a cube .... about 32 feet on a
side, or about 2 months worth of global production. Certainly do-able, particularly
as the purity and bulk characteristics wouldn't be very important. The amount
of fusion fuel required to activate the cobalt would be in the ballpark of
the atomic mass ratios, something in the low millions of pounds of lithium
deuteride or hundreds of thousands of pounds of cryogenic deuterium, giving
a yield in the multiple GT range (kaboom!). A fissionable second/third
stage tamper would up the yield and reduce the fusion fuel required (not like
the thing has to be clean!)(an inside nuclear joke)(kind of funny). Total
raw material cost would be just pennies per person, everybody's proverbial
2 cents worth you might say. The party would be kicked off by a boosted fission
core, swing into high gear in the next stage or few, and the jet stream would
take care of the rest. We could use our interceptor missiles to make pretty
colors in the sky while we waited.If we keep tolerating indiscriminate mass destruction, if we keep improving the means to bring it about, if we continue to pursue our own extinction, make no mistake but that we will eventually succeed. Before we take up the details of an alternative course, let us first understand that there is none.
