are Neutron Bombs real? or are they just figments of people imaginations?

Answer 1

Yes... but probably not the way you think of them.

All nuclear weapons release energy, and they release it in a number of ways. One is Blast, the big boom that knocks down bulidngs. Another is heat pulse, that starts fires. Another is radiation, another is fallout. Physics determines that a nuclear reaction of a particular size will give off a particular amount of energy. However the weapons designers and physics guys know how to monkey a bit with how much of the yield of the weapon goes out in each way.

What the press calls a "neutron bomb" is correctly called "an enhanced radiation warhead".

Back in the 1970s the USA had a heck of a problem. The Soviets outnumbered us 3:1 or better in Europe. If they came across the German border we would have had effectively an infinite number of Soviet Tanks coming at us. (The Army called this a "target rich enviornment".) We would have gone down fighting, but it was an open question if we could stop them before they hit the English Channel and the Atlantic Coast.

The plan was to try to stop them without using nukes, but if everything fell apart (and nobody thought it wouldn't) we would use "small" nuclear weapons (Tactical nuclear weapons, or Tac Nukes) to stop the Soviet tanks. Small meaning 1/3 of a Hiroshima (10,000 tons of TNT) or less. They would still leave on heck of a big mess. Even worse, even small nukes wouldn't do a very good job. Remember we are trying to kill a lot of guys in TANKS here, guys who are sitting behind several inches of steel and have been trained how to survive just such an attack. Tanks are pretty hard things to kill. Oh yeah we'd get some, but would we get ENOUGH? The obvious solution was to just use bigger Tac Nukes.

Well the Germans, who were our allies, wern't to keen on the idea of us turning large parts of their country (and a great many of their citizens) into nice neat clouds of radioactive dust. Germany isn't the biggest place in the universe, and a lot of it is city. You start tossing a half a dozen Hiroshima size bombs around, it is going to have a significant impact on local real estate values.

So we developed the enhanced radiation warhead. It boosted up the radiation pulse and cut down the blast damage,. heat pulse, and fallout (though it would still leave one hell of a big mess... you don't set off a couple of kilotons of BOOM and not make a mess, no matter what they say on TV). The idea was that the smaller blast and heat damage and lesser fallout would mean less wear and tear on the German real estate and the German people (nobody though there would be a whole lot of German civilians hanging around the Soviet Tank Divisions).

Since the plan was to drop these things on advancing Soviet Tanks, we needed something that would kill the guys inside the tanks. The way the bomb would do that was through radiation.

Long story short there are different kinds of radiation (Alpha, Beta, Gamma) and some kinds are harder to stop than others. The bomb was supposed to make a lot of neutron radiation (hence the name "Neutron Bomb") that would go right through the Soviet Tanks and kill the tank crews. Since this was supposed to be just an initial pulse of radiation it wouldn't leave things radioactive (like fallout does) and blast and heat damage would be minimized.

This was way to difficult for the press to understand and they wrote lots of stories about how we were making a weapon to kill people but not harm things, and how evil and materilaistic we were... blah, blah, blah.

TV people got wind of the idea and occasionally you will see a movie where "neutron bombs" have killed all the people but not harmed the buildings. This is done so that they can save money on sets.. they don't have to build a set they just rent a building and have everyone leave.

In real life it wouldn't be like that. Like I said, 10,000 tons of TNT makes one heck of a mess.

Thank God though we never had to use them. I don't know if any are left or not. We may have gotten rid of them since the end of the Cold War. That doesn't mean somebody else might not be able to make one though.

Answer 2

Yes I think they are real..

Answer 3

Yes, they are real.

Answer 4

They are real; eight countries have them in their arsenals, and they are NASTY weapons - real WMDs!