The Lusharik Incident:: The Doomsday Spin

You can't make this up..First Debka Reported an American Sub sunk "Scuttled" in American Waters..no more story development..THEN CNN..the Deep state organ reports a Russian sub Mistaken for Iranian..Hit by US in Arabian Waters..then deletes tweet

SYS,

"How to keep A cold War Warm...Simple..Just keep Blowing Hot Air On It.."

WISDOM FROM THE SYSTINE CHAPEL 

"Sub was on a mission to cut the transatlantic cables..the only problem is..there are no cables where it became disabled"

AHHH...THOSE GRAINS OF TRUTH IN ANY COVER STORY 





SHALOM...Z

 

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif is correct; INSTEX, already too little too late, is not even enough, as the mechanism does not allow Tehran to continue to export oil, which is the nation’s right. As for the “breach,” Zarif says it’s easily “reversible” – as long as the EU-3 abide by their commitments.

Russian energy minister Alexander Novak concurs: “As regards restrictions on Iranian exports, we support Iran and we believe that the sanctions are unlawful; they have not been approved by the UN.”

Catching up on your super bombs.

nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq1.html
By jacketing the third stage with non-fissionable material, three stage devices can produce high yield clean weapons. Both Zuni and Tsar Bomba were in fact very clean devices - Zuni was 85% fusion and Tsar Bomba was 97% fusion. Both designs permitted replacing the lead or tungsten third stage jacket with U-238 however. A version of Bassoon called Bassoon Prime was tested in the dirty Tewa test mentioned above. A dirty device derived from the Bassoon was weaponized to create the highest yield weapon the U.S. ever fielded, the 25 megaton Mk-41. The Tsar Bomba design was for a fission-fusion-fission bomb with a staggering yield of at least 100 megatons!


Cobalt Bombs and other Salted Bombs

A "salted" nuclear weapon is reminiscent of fission-fusion-fission weapons, but instead of a fissionable jacket around the secondary stage fusion fuel, a non-fissionable blanket of a specially chosen salting isotope is used (cobalt-59 in the case of the cobalt bomb). This blanket captures the escaping fusion neutrons to breed a radioactive isotope that maximizes the fallout hazard from the weapon rather than generating additional explosive force (and dangerous fission fallout) from fast fission of U-238.

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.


Table 1.6-1 Candidate Salting Agents

Parent Natural Radioactive Half-Life
Isotope Abundance Product

Cobalt-59 100% Co-60 5.26 years
Gold-197 100% Au-198 2.697 days
Tantalum-181 99.99% Ta-182 115 days
Zinc-64 48.89% Zn-65 244 days

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.

The Co-60 fallout hazard is greater than the fission products from a U-238 blanket because

many fission-produced isotopes have half-lives that are very short, and thus decay before the fallout settles or can be protected against by short-term sheltering;
many fission-produced isotopes have very long half-lives and thus do not produce very intense radiation;
the fission products are not radioactive at all. The half-life of Co-60 on the other hand is long enough to settle out before significant decay has occurred, and to make it impractical to wait out in shelters, yet is short enough that intense radiation is produced.

Initially gamma radiation fission products from an equivalent size fission-fusion-fission bomb are much more intense than Co-60: 15,000 times more intense at 1 hour; 35 times more intense at 1 week; 5 times more intense at 1 month; and about equal at 6 months. Thereafter fission drops off rapidly so that Co-60 fallout is 8 times more intense than fission at 1 year and 150 times more intense at 5 years. The very long lived isotopes produced by fission would overtake the again Co-60 after about 75 years.

Zinc has been proposed as an alternate candidate for the "doomsday role". The advantage of Zn-64 is that its faster decay leads to greater initial intensity. Disadvantages are that since it makes up only half of natural zinc, it must either be isotopically enriched or the yield will be cut in half; that it is a weaker gamma emitter than Co-60, putting out only one-fourth as many gammas for the same molar quantity; and that substantially amounts will decay during the world-wide dispersal process. Assuming pure Zn-64 is used, the radiation intensity of Zn-65 would initially be twice as much as Co-60. This would decline to being equal in 8 months, in 5 years Co-60 would be 110 times as intense.

Militarily useful radiological weapons would use local (as opposed to world-wide) contamination, and high initial intensities for rapid effects. Prolonged contamination is also undesirable. In this light Zn-64 is possibly better suited to military applications than cobalt, but probably inferior to tantalum or gold. As noted above ordinary "dirty" fusion-fission bombs have very high initial radiation intensities and must also be considered radiological weapons.

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.

medium.com/war-is-boring/the-lithium-blues-or-how-america-triggered-an-out-of-control-nuke-b4ea845b5d8a

The Lithium Blues—Or How America Triggered an Out-of-Control Nuke
The lightest metal has a heavy past as part of a runaway atomic test
War Is Boring
War Is Boring in War Is Boring
Mar 17, 2014 · 4 min read

You know lithium as the stuff that powers your iPhone, but you may not know that the lightest solid element also powers atomic bombs. Ignorance of lithium’s true nature once sparked a nuclear disaster.

In 1954, the U.S. tested its first hydrogen bomb fueled with a lithium compound. What the weaponeers didn’t know about lithium almost killed them.

Although lithium is fairly abundant, you almost never see it in its raw form. The silvery, butter-soft metal is highly combustible and so light that it floats. It keeps best in sealed jars of petroleum jelly.

Lithium’s reactivity makes it all kinds of useful. In addition to battery anodes and psychoactive medications, lithium compounds form the high-temperature greases and atmospheric scrubbers in submarines and spacecraft.

But lithium’s place on the periodic table right next to hydrogen and helium fascinates nuclear weapons designers. Hydrogen is the simplest possible element, consisting of a single proton surrounded by a single electron cloud. Add a neutron or two and you get hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.

Add a second proton and electron and hydrogen becomes helium. Add a third proton and electron and you get lithium. All this adding occurs naturally inside stars—and very briefly takes place during thermonuclear detonations.

In a fission bomb, a chemical explosion drives finely-machined chunks of uranium or plutonium together, forcing a runaway cascade of splitting atoms within the metal mass. The super-heavy nuclei break apart into lighter elements and release titanic energies as they split.

The reverse process occurs in a thermonuclear weapon. A fission bomb’s energy heats and compresses an armored capsule of fuel to star-like temperatures and pressures. The light elements—like hydrogen and lithium—then fuse together into heavier ones and release thousands of times more energy than the initial fission blast.

Hydrogen’s “heavy” isotopes, deuterium and tritium, yield the most energy when fused but require stupendous energies to glom together. Tritium swiftly decays and is expensive to make. But combine reactive lithium with deuterium into lithium deuteride and you have an ideal bomb fuel—a cheap, relatively inert powder.

The very first hydrogen bomb used liquid deuterium fuel which made for an incredibly huge and complex machine. The “Sausage” device detonated on Nov. 1, 1952 at Bikini Atoll during Operation Ivy. It weighed 82 tons and required a small chemical plant to fuel it.

It worked spectacularly well—the 10-and-a-half-megaton explosion produced a mile-wide crater and a 20-mile-high mushroom cloud.

But the Sausage was a physics experiment, not a working weapon. During the next Pacific nuclear test series, America tried out its new lithium-based bomb fuel.
The Shrimp device. Photo via Wikipedia

Operation Castle’s first shot, code-name Bravo, tested a much smaller device. The Shrimp weighed only 10 tons and was roughly the size of a deployable weapon. The lithium deuteride within its armored innards, derived from natural lithium compounds, consisted mostly of lithium-7 rather than its sibling isotope lithium-6.

The weaponeers saw no problem with this … and had little choice, anyway. American lithium enrichment had just started and very little lithium-6 was available. Lithium-6 breaks down into tritium when zapped. Lithium-7, they thought, reacted poorly to neutron bombardment. But in fact, lithium-7 creates gobs of tritium, much more than lithium-6.

A little knowledge turned out to be a very dangerous thing.

With thousands of personnel and hundreds of ships geared up for the test, commanders faced great pressure to get moving. With the clock running and the weather iffy, they detonated the Bravo shot just after 6:00 AM local time on March 1, 1954.

Unbeknownst to the scientists and soldiers, lithium-7 actually responds better to neutron bombardment than lithium-6. The resulting explosion yielded 15 megatons, the largest atmospheric detonation in American history.

Thanks to lithium-7’s unexpected “tritium bonus,” the Shrimp’s blast equaled the entire destructive power of all the bombs the Allies dropped in World War II.

An entire island turned into radioactive dust and the fallout seriously contaminated Bikini and two neighboring atolls. The ships of the Operation Castle task force steamed at flank speed away from the mushroom cloud, their decks covered with radioactive coral shards.

The Japanese fishing vessel Fifth Lucky Dragon, sailing well outside the safety zone, suffered one death and several casualties from radiation. The bomb’s firing crew retreated to a closet in their concrete bunker for 12 hours while their Geiger counters roared.

Lithium still powers thermonuclear weapons, but the Castle Bravo disaster forced scientists to better understand its nature. The United States created a huge lithium infrastructure and stockpile, but produced its last lithium-6 in 1963.

When the weaponeers need more lithium for bombs, they may have to stand in line behind the electric cars.

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