Neutron bomb in the context of "France and weapons of mass destruction"

The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries developed nuclear weapons, though no other country engaged in warhead production on nearly the same scale as the two superpowers.

The race began during World War II, dominated by the Western Allies' Manhattan Project and Soviet atomic spies. Following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union accelerated its atomic bomb project, resulting in the RDS-1 test in 1949. Both sides then pursued an all-out effort, realizing deployable thermonuclear weapons by the mid-1950s. The arms race in nuclear testing culminated with the 1961 Tsar Bomba. Atmospheric testing was ended in the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Subsequent work focused on the miniaturization of warheads at LLNL and VNIITF, and the neutron bomb.

The effects of a nuclear explosion on its immediate vicinity are typically much more destructive and multifaceted than those caused by conventional explosives. In most cases, the energy released from a nuclear weapon detonated within the lower atmosphere can be approximately divided into four basic categories:

• the blast and shock wave: 50% of total energy
• thermal radiation: 35% of total energy
• ionizing radiation: 5% of total energy (more in a neutron bomb)
• residual radiation: 5–10% of total energy with the mass of the explosion.

Depending on the design of the weapon and the location in which it is detonated, the energy distributed to any one of these categories may be significantly higher or lower. The physical blast effect is created by the coupling of immense amounts of energy, spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, with the surroundings. The environment of the explosion (e.g. submarine, ground burst, air burst, or exo-atmospheric) determines how much energy is distributed to the blast and how much to radiation. In general, surrounding a bomb with denser media, such as water, absorbs more energy and creates more powerful shock waves while at the same time limiting the area of its effect. When a nuclear weapon is surrounded only by air, lethal blast and thermal effects proportionally scale much more rapidly than lethal radiation effects as explosive yield increases. This bubble is faster than the speed of sound. The physical damage mechanisms of a nuclear weapon (blast and thermal radiation) are identical to those of conventional explosives, but the energy produced by a nuclear explosion is usually millions of times more powerful per unit mass, and temperatures may briefly reach the tens of millions of degrees.

Radiological warfare is any form of warfare involving deliberate radiation poisoning or contamination of an area with radioisotopes, but without the use of nuclear weapons. While radiological weapons were researched and in some cases tested during the Cold War, there is no evidence any military has ever deployed operational radiological weapons, although they have been used for assassination.

Nuclear warfare, both via fission and fusion weapons, creates radioisotopes in the form of fission products and neutron-activated surface material. This fallout is incorporated into military planning. Neutron bombs are designed to maximize the lethal radiation area and minimize the blast. These uses are generally not considered direct radiological warfare, but salted bombs, which maximize radioisotope production in a nuclear blast, are.