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)