Self Assured Destruction
If you thought mutually assured destruction was strange, wrap your mind around this:
An actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, [was] always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. … Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one. The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched. …
The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it. … So why didn’t the Soviets tell the world, or at least the White House, about it? … In fact, the Soviet military didn’t even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. … The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves. … By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. … No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge.
960 megatons is only 10 Tsar bombs, so it is possible.I read calculation in the book of P.D.Smith that the full bomb shoud weight 2.5 times of Lincor Missuri - or 150 000 tons.
The ITER will weght 30 000 tons and LHC is much larger.
So Doomsday bomb is possible.
See also Herman Khan. On Doomsday machine.http://www.scribd.com/doc/1...
I wonder if the cobalt bomb wasn't another example of double game theory.
When Leo Szilard suggested it in 1950 it was part of his argumentation against nuclear weapons: he tried to convince people that true doomsday devices were feasible, and that this made it imperative to stop the nascent arms race. While this argument didn't change the arms race, he might appear to have made things worse by giving a hint on how to build something very nasty.
However, when I calculated the necessary amount of cobalt and from that the necessary yield of the bomb I found that they were definitely in the very, very impractical range (many thousands of tons of metal, at least 960 megatons of yield). Now, Szilard was a very smart guy who could probably do these calculations easily in his head, and he knew the physics of nuclear weapons intimately. I hence guess that he might deliberately had come up with an example that would never be built, yet would convince the non-experts about the imminent danger. Perhaps he was even devious enough to make it an example that couldn't be publicly criticized on the technical grounds without giving away secrets about the then-in-development hydrogen bomb (since the important issue is how many tons of neutrons you can get to convert cobalt).
So maybe Szilard was trying to make a game-theoretical argument to the public and policy-makers, while also gaming a different game versus bomb-designers.