![]() ![]() The cobalt would then condense and fall back to Earth with the dust and debris from the explosion, contaminating the ground. ![]() When the bomb explodes, the neutrons produced by the fusion reaction in the secondary stage of the thermonuclear bomb’s explosion would transmute the cobalt to the radioactive cobalt-60, which would be vaporised by the explosion. MechanismĪ cobalt bomb could be made by placing a quantity of ordinary cobalt metal ( 59Co) around a thermonuclear bomb. Amongst other comments on it, Edward Moore Geist wrote a paper in which he says that “Russian decision makers would have little confidence that these areas would be in the intended locations” and Russian military experts are cited as saying that “robotic torpedoes could have other purposes, such as delivering deep-sea equipment or installing surveillance devices.” (those task are usually done directly by “oceanic research ships disabling the positioning and by submarines without any need for a huge robot mini-submarine to do the same task). If Status-6 does exist, it is not publicly known whether the leaked 2015 design is accurate, nor whether the 2015 claim that the torpedo might be a cobalt bomb is genuine. In 2018 the Pentagon’s annual Nuclear Posture Review stated Russia is developing a system called the “Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System”. It is not known whether the Status-6 is a real project, or whether it is Russian disinformation. Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta speculated that the warhead would be a cobalt bomb. The document stated the torpedo would create “wide areas of radioactive contamination, rendering them unusable for military, economic or other activity for a long time.” Its payload would be “many tens of megatons in yield”. The design was titled “Oceanic Multipurpose System Status-6”, later given the official name Poseidon. In 2015, a page from an apparent Russian nuclear torpedo design was leaked. Photosynthesizing vegetation exists all around the lake that was formed. The high percentage contribution is largely because the devices primarily used fusion rather than fission reactions, so the quantity of gamma-emitting caesium-137 fallout was comparatively low. In Russia, the triple “taiga” nuclear salvo test, as part of the preliminary March 1971 Pechora-Kama Canal project, produced relatively high amounts of cobalt-60 ( 60Co or Co-60) from the steel that surrounded the Taiga devices, with this fusion-generated neutron activation product being responsible for about half of the gamma dose in 2011 at the test site. This was considered a failure and the experiment was not repeated. The Operation Antler/Round 1 test by the British at the Tadje site in the Maralinga range in Australia on 14 September 1957, tested a bomb using cobalt pellets as a radiochemical tracer for estimating yield. His intent was not to propose that such a weapon be built, but to show that nuclear weapon technology would soon reach the point where it could end human life on Earth, a doomsday device. ![]() ![]() The concept of a cobalt bomb was originally described in a radio programme by physicist Leó Szilárd on 26 February 1950. A cobalt bomb is a type of “salted bomb”: a nuclear weapon designed to produce enhanced amounts of radioactive fallout, intended to contaminate a large area with radioactive material, potentially for the purpose of radiological warfare, mutual assured destruction or as doomsday devices. ![]()
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