> The hard part would be minimizing the radionuclides.

Not necessarily. Tsar Bomba, the highest yield device ever detonated, was also among the cleanest because they tampered the third stage with lead instead of U-238.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that it would be hard to design a device that released lots of SOX without also releasing lots of radioactive stuff. The simplest idea is an S-32 "casing". The good thing is that S-35 is the most stable sulfur isotope, with a half-life of 87.4 days. But I don't know what other products would be.

Chlorine. Just Chlorine.

So you get normal Cl-35 from S-35 by beta decay.

Can you get Cl-36 from S-32 by neutron capture?

Actually you get 32-Phosporous from that. If you want 36-Cl you need cosmic rays interacting with 36-Ar, 39-K, 40-Ca, or neutron activation of 35-Cl.

Doh. S-32 + n -> P-32 + p

And then P-32 decays back to S-32 with ~14 day half-life.

I wonder if people are working on this. It'd be a minor tweak to nuclear weapons models.

The problem is that you're still going to end up with plenty of fallout from "unburned" Uranium and various byproducts. That pollution won't be especially associated with the S you want, but it's going to produced alongside it regardless.

I was thinking of devices with ~100 tons sulfur each, lofted near the stratosphere in blimps. That yields persistent sulfur aerosols to decrease insolation. And yes, one challenge would be minimizing radionuclide production.

The problem is that ground-level SOX gives you acid rain, and washes out too fast to be useful for GCC mitigation. Increasing volcanism would arguably be even iffier than nuclear sulfur blimps.

Good point about the acid rain, the washout. I wonder if there's some way to dope solid rocket booster fuel to produce SOX at higher altitudes? As we launch more and more, maybe we could harness that to ease the burden on something like your blimp idea... thus avoiding the need to nuke the planet.

I was just riffing on the nuclear winter thing. But actually, blimps would be unworkable, because we would need to inject millions of tons of SOX per year into the stratosphere. And energy requirements are mostly for lifting, not dispersion.

Perhaps nuclear devices could be designed to produce upward-directed jets.

I wonder if a slower, but maybe safer alternative is just to increase the burning of SOX producing fuels. If we could scrub the carbon, we'd have a net-cooling effect.

That or we have to seriously consider induced volcanism.

It was cleaner than their original design, but still a wildly dirty, and stupidly inefficient device.

> stupidly inefficient device.

Any idiot can say that in 2017.

In 1967 you'd have to special kind of idiot to discount it as ineffective.

No, idiots are still impressed by big explosions. There's a reason it was scaled down from 100 MT, and even then it was known to be a waste, it used no new tech, was not practically deliverable, and oh yes... much of the blast energy just shot up and out into the stratosphere. How useful. It was designed to be a political statement as part of Cold War politics, and it was known by even its designers then that it was a silly fucking thing to be doing. To be honest, most nuclear testing by that point fell into the, "Silly fucking thing to be doing category..." but idiots still haven't figured that out.

If they'd had a Pacific test site, they might well have gone with 100 MT.

I suspect that you're right, although I hope that sanity might have prevailed. It's hard to imagine the damage the uranium liner + 50 megatons would have done to that ecosystem.

Of course if the US hadn't been experiencing so much political upheaval, they might have tried responding in kind.

Sanity ;)

The global nuclear arsenal is still over 2500 MT, I bet :(

I wish the North Koreans would get that memo.

The sad fact is that they kind of are the exception to that rule. Kind of. They actually need to test to develop their weapons, and they want the weapons to ensure continuity of their regime, but also to sell the tech (probably). It's a pretty evil/batshit thing to be doing I grant you, but... if they want nukes despite that, they at least need to test.

The crazy bastards.

It was so large there was no feasible way to even transport such a device other than maybe building it on a suicide ship.

It was purely a dick measuring contest at that point.

> It was so large there was no feasible way to even transport such a device other than maybe building it on a suicide ship.

Why is that not feasible? If they could get it on a submarine they could detonate in most of the worlds major cities.

Most of the world's major cities are not under water AFAIK.

No, but most of the largest cities are coastal, and you are somewhat more likely to get into a harbour with a hostile sub than with a hostile warship.

I really doubt that. I can't imagine that the US and the UK for example, don't have sonar networks and other means to detect subs. It might be nearly impossible to track a boomer in open ocean, but they're not designed for littoral operations and sonar networks are much more effective there. You also have to cope with an airforce and patrolling navy.

All in all, you're mostly likely to nuke the nearby ocean, rendering it mostly a radiological/environmental weapon. When you consider that you can far more easily launch a combined 100MT in smaller payloads, with a higher resulting degree of destruction than a single 100MT warhead...

I'm sure they could detect the sub, but the also have to be able to identify it as hostile and act before it can reach the city, which can take much longer. I also wonder if it's possible to "hide" under a cargo ship to escape detection?

The key phrase being "somewhat more likely".

I'm not arguing effectiveness. I was arguing against the "not under water" bit, after the person you responded to suggested a sub over a ship.

But at that point ~1/2 your detonation is over the ocean and useless. Further, unless you surface the water will dramatically reduce the bombs effectiveness.

You're still going to do a lot better than approaching with a ship that is plainly visible to anyone, and which will be taken out before it gets anywhere close, was the point.

Sure, but an ICBM with a single 10MT detonation would be dramatically better than both as you want it up in the air and over the population center. Remember the closet km is always gone, it's a question of what appens further out that's important. And thus you don't want a line of buildings to protect anything.

If your target is the city/population. If it's the president then a surprise attack would be better, although I doubt a nuke carrying enemy sub would be able to get that close.

Peak speed for an ICBM is in the ballpark of 6-7km/s (any faster and the payload would go orbital), and it takes about 10 minutes to accelerate to that speed. That's New York to Moscow in around 20 minutes.

So, a sub 1,000 miles from shore can hit you faster than you can get out of the blast range when you include a modest detection > reaction delay unless your sitting in an airport. It's vaguely possible you could get into a bunker in that time period, but unless you sleep in a bunker even that's not really viable.

However, by setting up things to respond in the event of a nuclear attack it does not really matter if you take out DC / Moscow as the other subs can respond anyway.

Maybe, but I was not discussing whether or not it was practical.

In warfare it's only the practical things that really matter. You might attach a grenade launcher, but you don't give people double barreled rifles.