Talk:Cobalt bomb
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Censorship?
That an article violates copyright is not a reason to delete the article entirely, but to FIX IT.
It's my experience that editors who just delete wholesale swaths of information on some technical wiki complaint oftentimes aren't so much worried about the technicality, but just don't want the information available at all. Kaz 21:47, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
- Actually, if an article is a copyright violation it is a reason to delete it. --Fastfission 14:05, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
-
- I would suggest fix over delete. Deletion should be only the most extreme solution. --Shaddack 12:00, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] language
"it could wipe out millions of people" The term "wipe out" probably wouldn't be found in an encyclopedia. Perhaps "kill" or something similar would be better?
- Replaced with 'slaughter'. Justification:
slaugh·ter (slô'ter) n. 1.The killing of animals especially for food. 2.The killing of a large number of people; a massacre: “I could not give my name to aid the slaughter in this war, fought on both sides for grossly material ends” (Sylvia Pankhurst). DV8 2XL 11:48, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
-
- You may maybe consider trying "eliminate". It is less bloody and more Strangelovish. --Shaddack 12:00, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
-
-
- I picked the term 'slaughter' on purpose. While I am not in any way anti-nuclear in any sense of the word, I won't whitewash the fact that nuclear weapons (particularly of the enhanced radiation sort) are designed to kill as many people as possible in the target area. DV8 2XL 12:06, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
-
[edit] Doomsday effect
~~MV~~
In order to make the article better, you could perhaps mention that cobalt bombs would be an extra and lingering danger in the area where they explode, but that however, the amount of cobalt required to cause the effect that Szilard described is enormous and not practical.
[edit] Accuracy
My physics teacher described a Cobalt bomb to us one day. What he describes was not a "dirty bomb" at all but the use of consecutive shells of elements ending in Cobalt. All of these shells would be wrapped around a standard hydrogen bomb. The basic idea is that energy release from one shell would be enough to start fusion in the next element, all the way to Cobalt. I forget the exact amount of energy released, but it would be enough to destroy the Earth.
- Nah-- either you misunderstood or your prof is out to lunch. Fusion is hard to produce, and early bombs "coated" even with shells of fusionables, even easy ones like deuterium, didn't fuse it very well (the shell configuration works in supernovas, but you need a star's gravity to help you with the shell compression, so it's not the same thing!). In either stars or bombs, for good fusion you need compression. This is a key idea.
- Almost all of the energy available for fusion is already available when making helium, a fact due to the unusually low energy of helium. There's absolutely no point in making a bomb which has higher elements to get energy from fusion, even if they were set up with compression to do it, because burning light deuterium and tritium provides more energy PER GRAM than any other fuel.Sbharris 20:03, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Appearance of cobalt after going through a nuke fireball?
Article states: The fallout of other nuclear weapons has the appearance of sand or ground pumice, which falls back to the ground in short time, and can be filtered by even a handkerchief, unlike cobalt-60 COMMENT: This badly needs needs a ref. How do YOU know what cobalt metal processed through a nuclear fireball would come out physically? A similar oxidized particulate to what the rest of fallout is described as, is MY guess. Sbharris 20:03, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Merge to Salted Bomb
I think that this article should be merged with the Salted bomb article. This is on a subset of that article, and doesn't really need its own page. --Apyule 14:56, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
Use In Science Fiction - The second Planet Of The Apes Film featured a doomsday weapon that was said to have a Cobolt caseing.
