@giujohn,
giujohn wrote:No...They should use a ERW (neutron bomb) then move in, dispose of the bodies, and takeover the cities...buildings and infrastructure still intact.
Neutron bombs don't actually do that. They were misportrayed as doing that by anti-nuclear activists as a way of demonizing them.
In reality neutron bombs are quite destructive to property in the area where the radiation is lethal.
Neutron bombs are also small in yield, which means it would take a huge number of them to cover a lot of area.
The reason behind neutron bombs was the problem of nuking Soviet tanks after they rolled into West Germany. A normal nuclear explosion powerful enough for the blast to destroy tanks in a half-mile radius, would level houses and kill civilians in a five mile radius.
With neutron bombs, the explosions would destroy houses in a half mile radius, and the radiation would kill people (including tank crews) in that very same half mile radius. Damage outside that half-mile radius would fall off quite quickly.
Things would still be bad for any civilians in the same area as the tanks that were being attacked. But with neutron bombs we'd no longer have to kill civilians in a five mile radius every time we killed tanks in a half-mile radius.
If we ever get to the point though where we can build weapons that combine matter and anti-matter, we could develop muon bombs, which at yields of 20 kt and lower would have the "killing without property damage" effects that are wrongly attributed to neutron bombs.
This is because when matter and anti-matter combine, one step in the process has all the energy contained in muons, which travel some distance before decaying into a more-regular particle. At yields of 20 kt or less, by the time the muon decays back into normal particles, the energy is too diffuse to have the radiation couple to the atmosphere in a normal nuclear fireball. The effect instead would be a powerful burst of soft X-rays with little other damage.
But of course, currently we don't have anti-matter weapons.
