>Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets?

this 2, laser driven inertial confinement and tokamak, don't pose a significant proliferation risk even/when they are successful. Unfortunately this 2 is also least promising as the decades of experiments have clearly shown. As a result, there is no rush of investments into them.

The proliferation risk is creation of relatively compact, say, in the first generation, up to transport container size fusion device. Creation and maintenance of such a weapon wouldn't be possible to control as there is no radiation, no uranium mining/buying, no massive enrichment facilities, no breeder reactors,... nothing to control. Basically a nightmare for modern international politics.

At the end of 199x the government analysis shown that the fusion wouldn't be cheaper than 4c/kwt of coal power and it would pose the significant proliferation risks if developed and miniaturized into the deliverable device. Thus we have such a dismal investment and progress. Do you pay attention to Sandia?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266841

I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb. Quite the opposite: one needs to keep the reaction under control, so keeping it small makes things easier. I suppose, in theory, it's possible, but I doubt it.

If you have a citation for where Sandia says there are proliferation risks, I would be interested.

it isn't a yield (like shock/heat wave, etc...) that is the primary purpose of neutron weapons. The neutron flux is what they are created for. Just for example - the neutron weapons deployed in Europe several decades ago were of very low yield, as low as it is possible with fissile-fusion weapon - their purpose was to stop Soviet Union tanks as intense neutron flux passes easily through the armor, yet is absorbed nicely by humans as we're 80% water.

>I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb.

No need to. The only thing what matters is the amount of neutrons generated. High intensity flux during 10-30sec. instead of super-high during 0.001ms explosion would do the same damage if the total amount of neutrons generated is the same.

I mentioned Sandia because what they do (more precisely what they did 10 years ago) was the most effective and promising way to get effective fusion - for energy generation as well as to weaponize it without fission part, and i think it is illustrative to look at them to see how progress has stalled (more precisely it was redirected from advancing of the engineering of the fusion into more plasma research) when it became that clear.

So you're saying it would be used to make a neutron bomb? Interesting.

I do understand that practical fusion requires neutron flux, but I didn't think we had achieved any significant amount of fusion capable of producing such a flux.