Strangelove (released Jan, 29, 1964) by Stanley Kubrick describes the Soviet Union building a cobalt/thorium-G bomb. On the Beach by Nevil Shute is one of the best known of the fictional stories dealing with cobalt bombs.The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy describes wrapping the bomb on the plane in a cobalt jacket to poison the enemy's landscape.Inspired by Szilárd's warnings, science fiction authors have occasionally made cobalt bombs the doomsday weapons in their works: The 60Co would have decayed to stable, and thus harmless, 60Ni. After fifteen to twenty years, the 60Co radiation would decrease by a factor of eight to sixteen, presumably making the area habitable again. What is unusual about this type of bomb is that the half-life is long enough to settle out before significant decay has occurred, and to make it impractical to wait out in shelters, yet is short enough that intense radiation is produced. The sheer size and cost of such a weapon makes it unlikely to be built, although it is technically possible because there is no maximum size limit for a thermonuclear bomb. Even so, critics of the cobalt bomb concept point out that the mass needed would still be unreasonably large: 1 gram of 60Co per square kilometer of Earth's surface is 510 tonnes. Smaller amounts of 60Co would take longer to kill, but would be effective over a large area. A prompt, full body dose of approximately three to four grays would kill 50% of the population in thirty days, and could be accumulated in just a few minutes of exposure to a gram of 60Co. Held at close range, this amount of cobalt-60 would irradiate a person with approximately 0.5 gray of ionizing radiation per minute. One gram of 60Co contains approximately fifty curies (1.85 terabecquerels) of radioactivity. The fallout would have a half-life of 5.27 years and would be intensely radioactive, a combination which caused Szilárd to suggest that such bombs could wipe out all life on the planet. Weapon of global destruction See also: Doomsday device
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