Talk:Cobalt bomb

I'm not sure how this should be expanded.

In the real world, a cobalt bomb is a salted A-bomb or H-bomb that's much less destructive in terms of blast damage and neutron radiation, but much more lethal in terms of fallout. Although it's technically almost the opposite of a neutron bomb, the effect is similar--more dead people, but less property damage.

However, in the Whoniverse, at least in some mentions, a cobalt bomb seems to be something that's much _more_ destructive than an H-bomb.

Most likely, the writers simply made a mistake. They heard about Leo Szilard, one of the inventors of the A-bomb, saying that a big-enough cobalt bomb could kill all of humanity. They assumed it would have to be a super-huge blast to pull that off, but actually it would be a very small blast that just poisoned the atmosphere with so much fallout that nearly everyone would contract radiation sickness and/or cobalt poisoning and die slowly over the next few months or years. But this is obviously just speculation about the writers' intention, which doesn't seem like a good basis for an article.

We could also try to imagine how something that could sensibly be called a cobalt bomb could be more destructive than an H-bomb. The only idea I can think of is a supernova bomb. If you could somehow accelerate the lifecycle of a massive star, and/or increase gravity around a medium star to make it act like a massive one, you could push it into the last day of a massive star's normal lifespan. In this last day, the star goes through the silicon-burning process until it finally gets to zinc, which can't be alpha-fused to create more energy, so the last reaction is beta-decay to cobalt. Since this doesn't provide nearly enough energy to stave off gravitational collapse, you get a type-II supernova. Which is pretty impressively destructive. But of course this is even more speculative. --32.139.58.88 09:30, March 16, 2010 (UTC)

We work with in-universe references, we don't 'imagine' or speculate anything. We work with what the source material says. In this case it's the novels and comics that made reference to the cobalt bomb.

The writers didn't make a mistake, not in the way you mean. The writers didn't make a mistake with the fictional universe, they took a term from the real world, which when looking at that real world term and trying to fold it back into the fictional universe it is perceived as a mistake. It's not an error on the writer's side because in-universe the cobalt bomb is defined as something that has "greater destructive power than that of a standard nuclear weapon." The error comes when trying to apply the real world to the article. --Tangerineduel 11:37, March 16, 2010 (UTC)

I second Tangerineduel, The temptation with articles about things that exist in the real world is to give a short summary of what is known about that thing in the real world, and then to write about its use in the DW universe. In reality, though, the way forward with this article is to avoid the real world cobalt bombs, for th emost part. Instead, provide details about how the cobalt bomb was used in each of the cases listed. Offer descriptions of it in each one of those instances. Then, in a very brief paragraph at the very bottom of the article, you can state, in a few sentences, the differences between the fictional cobalt bombs and the DWU ones. By and large though, discussion of the intricacies of real world cobalt bombs is left to the Wikipedia article, which is already linked on the page. I stress again, though, keep any discussion of the real thing brief, relative to the depictions offered in the DWU, and at the bottom of the article. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 08:27, March 17, 2010 (UTC)