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Pentagon had a plan for “dirty nuclear bombs”

We Now Know the Army Tested Its Own Nuclear ‘Dirty Bombs’. This Is What Happened.Was it a waste of time? National Interest by Joseph Trevithick, 3 Aug 18 

We don’t know how long the Army continued to work on these dirty bombs. The Pentagon only declassified these two reports in 2000 as part of larger project to determine how many servicemen and women might have been exposed to dangerous radiation in such experiments over the years. The information had been kept secret under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.

From television to Hollywood blockbusters, the “dirty bomb” – a device designed to spew radioactive material rather than set off a massive atomic explosion – has captured the public imagination as a potential terrorist weapon. But the U.S. Army once tried to make it into a real weapon of war.
In 1952, the ground combat branch conducted at least two live tests of prototype munitions at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The experimental E-83 “radiological bomb” consisted of more than 70 pounds of tantalum 181 pellets wrapped around a high explosive charge, as technicians explained in one report :

……….We don’t know how long the Army continued to work on these dirty bombs. The Pentagon only declassified these two reports in 2000 as part of larger project to determine how many servicemen and women might have been exposed to dangerous radiation in such experiments over the years. The information had been kept secret under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.

But the Pentagon seems to have quickly passed over the radiological weapons for increasingly powerful nuclear bombs. By the 1960s, American and foreign scientists had discovered how to produce similar “enhanced radiation” effects with small hydrogen bombs, more commonly known as neutron bombs.

Like a dirty bomb, the neutron bomb uses lethal doses of radiation to kill or otherwise incapacitate people. With these designs available, it’s unlikely — as far as we know — that the Pentagon would ever return to experimenting on cruder radiological weapons.  https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/we-now-know-army-tested-its-own-nuclear-%E2%80%98dirty-bombs%E2%80%99-what-happened-27762

August 4, 2018 - Posted by | USA, weapons and war

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