Well if Americans should add dirty bomb to it's arsenal why shouldnt Iran and N.Korea add it too.

Thats a decision best left to the Iranians and N. Koreans. I see what you are trying to say. But I dont argue moral equivilency. We should develope our weapons regardless of if others do it or not.

The weapon would have no mushroom cloud and the explosion would be for the purpose of dispersing the radioactive material rather than blast. The concept of operation would be to deploy the weapon in areas we wish to deny to the enemy. Or to sanitize known areas of enemy operation. This weapon would be especially useful for against enemies not equiped or trained for NBC operations. -snip- Probably a waste of money. Existing NBC weapons can serve the same function. I am all for the use of whatever weapon will kill terrorists most effeciently. If this happens to be some type of tactical nuke , so be it. I have no idea why there is such a hue and cry over the use of a particular weapons system. If it kills you , you are just as dead.

I was thinking in terms of harnessing the fall out portion of the traditional nuclear warhead minus the blast, heat and fire. And with much shorter longterm effects. Similar to a persistent chemical weapon but not a chemical weapon. That way we can legally get around our treaty obligations.

Several years ago, there was a study looking at employing one to five megaton yield devices on a continental shelf, in the form of a mine. By triggering a series of these, it was believed that a highly radioactive "mist" of irradiated sodium could be used to drift over near shoreline areas. It was attractive, in that in a radioactive medium, sodium would only have an effective half-life of about 24 hours. Enough of these mines placed, say, along the western coast of the U.S. would ensure the extermination of millions while leaving the infrastructure virturally intact. Unfortunately, it would really only work under those geographic conditions; and you'd have to get the mines placed covertly, and have the appropriate prevalent weather conditions. I have heard rumor of a so-called "mini-neutron bomb" using sub-kiloton yield devices. Numerous papers exist on "tweaking" specific boosting elements to produce a much dirtier weapon with greater hard radiation. BUT...it's still a nuke, with all of the attendant political fuss.

My impression is that it's not that easy to design a reliable dirty bomb, and given the rather narrow use parameters it's just not worth the money to develop one.

Darth America, good idea, very imaginative. I'm not too sure about the details, but this is an idea worth looking into further. It would be a cheap, and effective area denial weapon. Increasing the half-life to a few weeks and dropping them deep behind enemy lines would give you a nice battlefield isolation weapon.

As briefly alluded to, aren't you really talking about a neutron bomb? As I asked in another thread - didn't Bush Sr. have all these destroyed (if any were indeed manufactured)? If what is being proposed here isn't a neutron bomb - how does it differ?

A neutron bomb is a nuclear bomb that has been tweaked to convert more of the energy into fast neutron radiation as opposed to blast, heat, and light. This bomb is just a bunch of radioactive junk with enough explosive to spread it.

The problem with an effective dirty bomb is the half life of the isotope, either it is too short either for time of manufactuor to dilivery, or it isn't effective for area denial, on the other end you've got stuff which is higly radioactive for years upon years, there is cobolt 60, which is highly radioactive for 5 years but even that in a tactical sense is too long for area denial. IMPO the best stuff to use in a dirty bomb is powdered pultonium dioxide, which is used in MOX nuclear reactors and is avaiable in vearius parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, because it comes from the fuel cycle it will most likly contain Pu240, which while unsuitable for nuclear weapons, is very radioactive. Though I'm not fully sure, PuO2 shouldn't be hard to produce on an industial scale, in a way similar to how Pu was made for nuclear weapons programs ie. neutron bombardment of U238, instead of useing pure U238 use UO2, which can be obtained directly from uranium ore with little processing or from the nuclear fuel cycle.