Isomer Weapons an alternative to Nuclear Weapons ?, page 1

Actually,

As an Empire, the U.S. and her First Tier allies _do not_ want these kinds of weapons to be developed because they leverage smaller/terror forces (with less to lose and more desire to prove their ruthlessness in doing so) more than they do larger ones which are incredibly easy to hit due to the spread of their assets.

If there is a utility for these weapons, I would say that it would have to be as select, high altitude, HPM or equivalent devices to 'charge' the bronze lens casing in some kinds of explosive deformation electronics kill weapons (we knew that we could detonate the 1.5KT W-25 in the AIR-2 over populated areas and not have the fallout reach earth).

I frankly don't remember at the moment whether Gamma is ionizing or non ionizing as a particle but if it is the operating destruct mechanism of an isomer weapon and 'resident' in the environment for any length of time, it is in fact less usable than a conventional nuke for anything which creates surface uplift.

MYSELF, I prefer a weapon which hits, using differential EDGE or WAGE techniques, within about 20cm of aimpoint over one which has just huge yields. Because if I can kill a man by hitting him in the forehead with a hammer that breaks with every use, I can carry a lot more ball peens than I can sledges to take out area or decoy protected target sets.

If you add AMSTE moving target track and a seeker (GBU-40 vice 39), you typically have all the 'better the temple than the tongue' offsetting intra-target aimpoint accuracy required to make life miserable for a range of threats (tanks or clustered men both would die when hit with 90 odd pounds of explosive ammunition mass. The one to direct impact on select vulnerable points on a turret. The other to airburst fragmentation).

Even as increased loiter time (/smaller size/ means easier to carry in multiple at low drag or low internal volumetric penalty) to hit them, as they whack-a-mole come rather than chasing them into a collaterals rich area based on 'intel' which frequently misinfo'd wrong or dated.

As a deep/hard target kill mechanization, the B-61-11 itself is not a real replacement for the W/B-53 so much as simply a device which bombers other than the B-52 can carry. SIOP being what it is, I am sure there are 'limiters in place' (sub ceilings within the over nuclear floor breach threshold) which would prevent us from detonating 10MT worth of yield over a mountain side simply to crush a DPRK weapons cache buried underneath.

Not least because Bejing is only 250nm across the Yellow Sea.

But the fact remains that strata-coupling only takes you so far underground with a so-called 'seismic kill' effect and there are also problems with current steel alloys vs. impact energy when it comes to using kinetic overpenetration with boosted weapons or RVs to get more than the 6m which I think is as far as the dash-11 has ever achieved.

This puts you right back at sealing the exits of depots or finding pre-distributed (empty sack) warheads in the field which is a _targeting_ not munition problem.

And as soon as they become surface targets, the only reason for having atomic or atomic-like yields for Counter Force use goes away and you are _right back_ at hostaging (Counter Value) civillian target sets on the basis of who is willing to kill the nation they rule to prove a point about politics.

The sadness being that I don't think UBL and Company /or/ the Norks really believe we will remove the entire Arab/Islamic or (North) Korean populace from the annals of humankind if they try something dumb. And I'm not sure they would care, ultimately, (losing another Peninsular War) even if they did believe.

There being nothing dumber, IMO, than putting radiologics of /any/ kind into smaller and smaller packages for 'ease of terrorist use'

KPl.