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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

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...

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

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.

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