Cobalt bomb?

Ok, I've heard people talking about a Russian super nuclear bomb known as the 'cobalt bomb' however I've been able to find no information on it. Does any one know what this is, or what it may be? any info will be greatly appreciated!

King of bombs:

nuclearweaponarchive.org...

The best site for comprehensive information:

nuclearweaponarchive.org...

Wow, I knew it would've been a big bomb, but thats HUGE... man lucky thing we (U.S.) didn't end up heating up the cold war, they could have killed us with that/those, that is if the modified BearA1 bombers got past our interceptor fighters.

A ' cobalt ' bombs refers to an extremely dirty nuclear weapon used specifically to render an area uninhabitable for thousands of years through Cobalt-60 radiation.
The bomb is merely a standard nuclear weapon, with Cobalt added. There were rumours that the Israeli's had cobalt collars for some of their weapons, I assume as a 'final solution' to the Arab problem.

The Tsar bomb is simply a giant thermonuclear weapon capbale of being built by any of the established nuclear powers. There just isn't any point in building a weapon that big.

[edit on 17-12-2005 by mad scientist]

the cobalt bombs " were designed , built and then discareded as impractical .

the " cobalt bomb " has entered myth - esp the russian " supper bombs " - just stop and think for a moment - just how much cobalt you would need to " cover the earth " as several folks claim , even at a coverage of a few grams / acre - the requirement is enormouss .

i had an article exploding the myths and realities of cobalt seeded munitions - but i cannot find it now

bottom line - a real concept that proved impractical and has since been blown out of all proportion

The USSR had plans for a "Doomsday" weapon that was a huge Cobalt bomb I think. It was going to be created in a huge tanker ship. It was designed to shoot so much radioactive material into the atmosphere that it would kill all the humans on earth. I say the plans for it one time it was huge.

They never built it though.

Originally posted by ignorant_ape
the " cobalt bomb " has entered myth - esp the russian " supper bombs " - just stop and think for a moment - just how much cobalt you would need to " cover the earth " as several folks claim , even at a coverage of a few grams / acre - the requirement is enormouss .

Cobalt just makes the bomb more lethal in terms of radiation. When surface burst all the dirt and is sucked up and iradiated as well ie. a mushroom cloud.
No one claims one or several bombs would kill everyone, but if most weapon had were salted with cobalt then yes it could well happen.
They were originally designed to deny areas of land p[ermanently to an enemy, well for thousands of years anyway.
They were never deployed because of the obvious, there effects would far outlast any war and would have detrimental results to the human population.

PS. Every human born during the age of nuclear weapons has Cobalt-60 in their bones.


Here's something interesting about salting bombs :

Variable fallout effects can be obtained by using different salting isotopes. Gold has been proposed for short-term fallout (days), tantalum and zinc for fallout of intermediate duration (months), and cobalt for long term contamination (years). To be useful for salting, the parent isotopes must be abundant in the natural element, and the neutron-bred radioactive product must be a strong emitter of penetrating gamma rays....


.....The idea of the cobalt bomb originated with Leo Szilard who publicized it in Feb. 1950, not as a serious proposal for weapon, but to point out that it would soon be possible in principle to build a weapon that could kill everybody on earth (see Doomsday Device in Questions and Answers). To design such a theoretical weapon a radioactive isotope is needed that can be dispersed world wide before it decays. Such dispersal takes many months to a few years so the half-life of Co-60 is ideal. ....


.....No cobalt or other salted bomb has ever been atmospherically tested, and as far as is publicly known none have ever been built. In light of the ready availability of fission-fusion-fission bombs, it is unlikely any special-purpose fallout contamination weapon will ever be developed.

The British did test a bomb that incorporated cobalt as an experimental radiochemical tracer (Antler/Round 1, 14 September 1957). This 1 kt device was exploded at the Tadje site, Maralinga range, Australia. The experiment was regarded as a failure and not repeated.


www.cartage.org.lb...

salted bombs *can* come if 3 flavours :

short term effects (but longer than normal bombs) would have a gold layer - this is also used to enhance the radiation(neutron and xray) as used in the W71 warhead used in the USA Spartan ABM.


middle term effects , and the prefference for replacing cobalt in the layer would be zinc - the half life is measured in 100`s of days , rather than 5 years for cobalt BUT the radiation intensity is greater than CO-60.

and of course long term effects : Cobalt. Cobalt lasts for years in radioactive form , is very persistant , and resistant to removal , as well as being a strong emmitter.

nuclearweaponarchive.org...

more info there.

a `neutron` bomb is a misnomer - all it does is add an outer layer which does not inhibit as much the escaping radiation (in fact it enhances it)- the material used (as an example gold) also defines the characteristics of the escaping radiation.


so to sum up ; the effects of `salted` nukes last much longer than days/weeks - CO-60 is something like 5 years for beta decay and ZN-65 is something like 8 months; AU-198 is amoungst the shortest at 3 days.