Cobalt bombs are the stuff of our post-apocalyptic nightmares – nuclear weapons specifically designed to exterminate masses through intense and long-lasting radioactive fallout. By maximizing lethal radiation disbursement, these hypothetical doomsday devices could render large parts of our world an irradiated wasteland. This article examines the genesis, effects, and implications of the cobalt bomb concept as the epitome of humankind‘s flirtation with suicidal technology.
Origin of the Cobalt Bomb Idea
Cobalt bombs originate from 1950s era theorizing around salted thermonuclear weapons – hydrogen bombs encased with gold, sodium, cobalt or other materials to enhance radioactive fallout from their blast. While early H-bomb tests included heavy casing, the large fission primary stage generated significant fallout on its own. Intentionally dirty bombs were seen as overdoing mutually assured destruction.
The term "cobalt bomb" came from 1985 broadcast mockumentary "Threads" which depicted a nuclear exchange contaminating Britain with radioactive cobalt. Earlier in the Cold War, the US Air Force recommended using cobalt jackets on bombs destined for Soviet industrial areas to maximize long-term damage. But as nuclear states converged on doctrine limiting civilian targeting, dirty bombs were dismissed as militarily and politically unviable. They notwithstanding remain lodged in our cultural fear as harbingers of civilizational collapse.
Apocalyptic Consequences
Detonation of 800 cobalt salted 1 megaton warheads evenly across the world‘s land mass would effectively extinguish humanity through radiation saturation. The combined fallout would amount to 5 million Hiroshima bombs worth of contamination. Just one percent of one megaton bomb‘s fallout sprinkled uniformly would still collapse global food supplies through contamination. Even minimal contact would eventually induce radiation sickness and cancer in most mammals.
The central idea behind the cobalt bomb is converting the metal into intensely radioactive Cobalt-60 when it absorbs the weapon‘s free neutrons. This maximizes fallout zones and duration over months and years rather than days. Make no mistake, standard nuclear arms already pose extreme radiological threats through neutron activation of soil and infrastructure. But cobalt salting produces four times higher fallout radiation lasting over 5 years.
Wayward wind patterns after a cobalt bombing could lace coasts and watersheds in deathly gamma particles. You thought scavenging for supplies in irradiated Chernobyl was intense? Try navigating hot zones 30 times stronger in contamination level. Your Geiger counter will be clicking itself hoarse!
Mechanism of Radiological Contamination
All nuclear explosions generate prompt neutron and gamma radiation damaging bodies and structures nearby. The fireball also broadcasts the fission fragments creating additional radioisotopes that attach to debris sucked upward. This deadly dust rains down as black radioactive fallout.
Cobalt surrounds the thermonuclear secondary stage. The high neutron flux converts cobalt-59 atoms into radioactive cobalt-60. This isotope unleashes lethal gamma radiation with 5.3 year half-life. Just 0.1 grams of Co-60 emits 1 rem of radiation energy per hour. Small comfort if just 100 grams finds its way into your survivor hideout!
Salted bomb cases utilized metals like gold or sodium to create longer lived fission product fallout. But cobalt-60 proves the scariest given high penetrating gamma radiation, long half-life enabling global dispersal before decay, and how vital agriculture depends on untainted soil and livestock feed.
Confronting Nuclear Horrors
As I researched details around cobalt bombs, an uneasy sense washed over me – the realization we constructed armaments capable of paramount destruction. What does our appetite for cataclysm say about humanity? Even if specific cobalt bomb projects got shelved for being "too much", we came right up to that abyss of pulling in the entire house down on our civilization‘s head.
Perhaps video game franchises like Fallout and Metro where nuclear war lays the past to waste help us process this horror. We model post-apocalypses serving both as warnings and as means for transcending the fears harrowed minds harbor. My own nightmares graft autocatalytic cobalt contaminants onto zombie outbreak narratives!
But we must take care our hypothetical speculations around doomsday weapons don‘t somehow will maleficent manifestations into reality. Better instead to directly dismantle the warmaking infrastructure threatening omnicide upon all peoples.
Radiation Effects Beyond Immediate Harm
Detonated cobalt bombs promise destruction persisting over 5 year intervals, but that understates true duration nuclear survivors would face. Radioactive cobalt-60 eventually transforms into stable nickel-60, but prior beta decay and gamma emission wreaks biological havoc.
Radiation particles rip through cells, shredding DNA sequences. This either kills outright or increasingly corrupts genetic coding across generations. Chromosomal aberrations become heritable, elevating mortality risks. Future children face elevated cancer predisposition from ancestral exposure.
Studies on Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors show higher cancer incidence decades later along with recurring health issues. We transmute elements not alone but our lineages too, incarnating death‘s legacy. Would cobalt fallout so twist life‘s tapestry over such vast spans that mangled progeny minister to misshapen ruins?
Treaty Limitations on Nuclear Arms
Thankfully, no nation has officially created or tested cobalt salted bombs. Their bronze sibling, the prototype Mk-41 thermonuclear bomb, intentionally incorporated a thick unsafe gold casing to generate longer lasting fallout. When detonated in 1956 with 70 times Hiroshima‘s power, therzle became the highest radioactive fallout producing US test.
Cobalt bombs violate the spirit if not letter of non-proliferation treaties. The Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty prohibited above ground nuclear testing which dispersed global fallout observed accumulating up the food chain. While underground tests continued for three decades, public nuisance over radioactive hazards from military fuel facilities helped spark the anti-nuclear movement.
Later Strategic Arms Limitations Talks between the US and USSR constrained multiple independent reentry vehicle missiles which enable first strike decapitation scenarios. The lingering unrestrainable potential for rapid retaliation by triad forces continues feeding existential nuclear risk scenarios. Continued arms reductions must remain high international priority.
Reclaiming Nuclear Domain for Energy
We stand now at a collective watershed where our choices steer down either path of destiny – one direction lit by beacons of promise and imagination where atom unlocked matter cradles progressive restoration, the other swallowed by cobalt shadows expire our star-born experiment.
Beyond deterrent philosophies no longer applicable, we must transform weapons industrial capacities into life affirming infrastructure benefitting all peoples; we must creatively apply nuclear technology to curing diseases, powering spacecraft, and linking global abundancy; we must enter fusion‘s dawn and harness stars here below.
The atomic fire that birthed cobalt‘s radiant corruption also carries seeds potent to elevate humanity‘s estate should we summon discipline pairing wisdom and compassion. Having ventured close enough for glimpse into that other abyss, let us therefore turn our talents to healing.