Cobalt Bombs: The Theoretical Doomsday Devices and Their Terrifying Potential
In 1957, as the world’s nuclear anxiety began to crank up, Nevil Shute released a fictional book that captured the slow unraveling end of the world and its effect on the community in and around Melbourne. The story follows a group of characters as they try to come to terms with a steadily approaching radiation cloud that kills everything in its path. With the rest of the world already gone, either through the quick World War III that erupted or the radiation fallout, the story’s protagonists must struggle with the inevitable and, if possible, enjoy their last few months before the last flicker of humanity is finally extinguished. It is a tale of impending doom and heartbreak quite unlike anything else and thankfully this has never come even remotely close to happening. However, the doomsday weapons that heralded the end of the world in the book are very much a reality. Well, a terrifying theoretical reality at least. These are the nuclear bombs that top them all, the gold medal-winning weapons that have the power to bring about the end of days. They are cobalt bombs.
We tend to lump all nuclear devices under the same “nuclear bomb” banner, but there are considerable differences between the many bombs lying around the world that have the power to kill tens of thousands of people at the very minimum. The biggest difference to begin with is the contrast between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion weapons. With nuclear fission, a heavy atom is split into two lighter ones, while with nuclear fusion, the exact opposite happens with two lighter atoms fusing to make a heavier one. In layman’s terms, nuclear fission and the fission products it emits is more unstable and produces significantly more nuclear fallout and higher levels of radiation. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, can be far more destructive but is regarded as more stable as it does not create fission products. So, in theory, a bigger initial explosion but less contamination. Although hydrogen bombs, which fall into the fusion category, typically include multi-stages which can include a fission stage. So, if you’re a sadistic megalomaniac hellbent on destroying the world with a hydrogen bomb, you can have the best of both worlds.
If it was possible to take an even darker turn from nuclear weapons, salted bombs would be it. These are essentially nuclear weapons that have been specifically designed as a radiological weapon, producing enhanced quantities of radioactive fallout, leaving an area completely uninhabitable for a long period. The use of the word “salt” comes from the expression “salting the earth,” which was a ritual of spreading salt over the destroyed remains of cities as a way of cursing its re-inhabitation. This was a widespread practice in the ancient Near East, and the story goes that the Romans plowed salt into the ground over the ashes of Carthage after they obliterated the once-great city in 146 BC.
The concept, in conjunction with nuclear weapons, was first discussed by Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard in 1950. He was far from a globe-destroying kind of person and spent the last years of his life campaigning passionately against the use of salted nuclear weapons. As far as we know, a large-scale salted nuclear bomb has never been built, but the theory behind it has been clear for some time. A salted bomb could be created using either a fission or fusion nuclear device, which is surrounded by a material containing an element (either gold 198, tantalum 182, zinc 65, or cobalt 60) that can be converted to a highly radioactive isotope by neutron bombardment. Once the bomb explodes, the element absorbs neutrons released by the nuclear reaction, converting it into its radioactive form and unleashing absolute hell. The result would almost certainly be extreme levels of radiation spread over a wide area that would stick around for a really, really long time. Depending on the element used, you might be looking at over a hundred years until an area would be inhabitable again. These are weapons so awful, so destructive, that even the two giants of the Cold War stayed away from them. Salted bombs go way beyond anything we can imagine. Not only would they destroy cities in the initial attack, their effects would spread slowly, far and wide, effectively butchering large areas of the planet.
And that brings us to element number 27 on the periodic table, cobalt. A magnetic, silver-blue metal that is used to make lithium-ion batteries, powerful magnets, and alloys in jet turbines and gas turbine generators. White cobalt salts have been used for centuries to make the color blue in paint, porcelain, glass, pottery, and enamels. And then we come to the more unstable, and certainly fierier, isotope cobalt 60. A highly radioactive cobalt spin-off that is used to fight cancer, something that Leo Szilard discovered in the late 1950s and even used on himself after his own cancer diagnosis. It certainly has some noble usage, but used in the wrong way, it could be used to create an unimaginably horrible new breed of nuclear weapons. The wonderful irony of this adaptive yet terrifying element is that it is an essential trace element, meaning that humans need it to live. Now, we don’t need much of it, and a typical human body only contains around one milligram, but it does form part of the active site of vitamin B12, which is really important to us.
As far as we can tell, building a cobalt bomb wouldn’t be too difficult, providing you have huge amounts of cobalt at hand. All you would then need is a standard hydrogen bomb that you’d surround with large quantities of cobalt 59. Once the bomb detonates, the neutrons produced would transmute the cobalt to the radioactive cobalt 60, all of which would be vaporized during the explosion. This sounds like a good thing, but actually, the cobalt would then condense and slowly drift back down to Earth, where it would contaminate everything around it. While no large-scale cobalt bombs have ever emerged (famous last words), the world has seen at least two fairly small-scale tests that involved cobalt in one way or another, first by the British in the 1950s and then by the Soviets in the 1970s.
The British test took place on the 14th of September 1957 at the Taji site in the Maralinga region in Australia and used small cobalt 60 pellets as a tracer for determining yield. The bomb used had a blast yield of 1.5 kilotons of TNT and a cloud that rose to 2,900 meters or 9,500 feet, spraying cobalt pellets over a wide area. Quite astonishingly, hardly any personnel had been informed about the inclusion of the pellets, leading to several instances of people picking up the strange objects and suffering mild radiation poisoning as a result. The test was generally considered a failure, and that was the last time that the British ever played around with cobalt.
The Soviet nuclear test in 1971 produced high amounts of cobalt 60 from the steel that surrounded the nuclear device, but as far as we can tell, this doesn’t appear to have been on purpose. And despite high levels of radiation being emitted, it’s thought that the plant life in the area has since returned to normal.
Now, you’ve got to remember that cobalt bombs are not all about their initial physical destructive power, but rather what comes afterward. There are numerous factors to consider here: the quality of the cobalt, the percentage conversion of cobalt 59 into cobalt 60, the presence of wind, etc. But in theory, a single large-scale cobalt bomb could effectively end humanity if a few factors went the right way. If a nuclear weapon was dropped containing 510 tons of cobalt, it could theoretically, at least, distribute one gram (0.03 ounces) of cobalt to each square kilometer of the Earth. One gram would probably include around 50 curies or 1.85 terabecquerels of radiation, which would irradiate a person with roughly 0.5 grays of ionizing radiation per minute. To give you an idea of just how bad that would be, three or four grays (six to eight minutes exposed to the worst stuff) would wipe out 50 percent of the population in just 30 days, with the rest close behind. And remember, that’s just with a tiny amount of exposure time, less than the time it would take to make a hard-boiled egg.
However, that’s the worst-case scenario. The likelihood would be that the fallout would not distribute evenly, leaving some areas heavily radioactive and others not. Whether small patches with low enough radiation for humans to survive might remain isn’t exactly clear. Even if areas did escape the initial fallout, the radioactive isotopes would be strong enough to effectively become a part of natural meteorological cycles, meaning it could rain radioactive cobalt.
Cobalt 60 comes with a half-life of 5.27 years before decaying into nickel 60. However, that 5.27 years is a little misleading as this simply means that half of the cobalt will decay by this point and just means that you’d be able to survive in the area a little longer than before. If this initial blast yielded a fallout with the strength of 10 sieverts per hour, people would receive a lethal dose in just 30 minutes. And 5.27 years later, you could spend a whopping hour there before your body began crumbling from the effects. Ten half-lives in, or 53 years to us non-physicists, the dose rate would have reduced further to 10 millisieverts an hour, and a person could spend four days in the area with no immediate effects. Anything longer than four days, and by that, I mean four days and a few hours, you’d start to feel not too good, and your days may well be numbered. 105 years after the explosion, 20 half-lives down, the dose rate would be down to 10 millisieverts an hour, meaning that people could remain outside full-time. But considering this level is still around 30 times higher than normal levels, it’s likely that the fallout would still cause considerable health damage further down the road. The magic point where the fallout from a cobalt bomb would become negligible is thought to be around 130 years, which is a long time to wait in a bomb shelter.
But this is all something that we don’t need to worry about, right? Well, maybe. In 2015, Russian state TV broadcast a video of a meeting between Putin and his military chiefs which accidentally revealed plans for a new torpedo known as the Oceanic Multipurpose Status-6 System, with one particular general seen openly holding a piece of paper with details of the new superweapon on it. The whole thing was a little too convenient for our liking, and many have marked this down as simply yet another of Russia’s rather clumsy misinformation attempts to scare those in the West and to raise some much-needed prestige at home. But we probably shouldn’t completely discount it. According to the quick snatches of information afforded to us, the torpedo is designed to have a range of up to ten thousand kilometers and a depth trajectory of up to a thousand meters. Though there’s absolutely no mention of cobalt, those rumors seem to have begun afterward. Soon after, diagrams began appearing on U.S television showing the potential fallout from a cobalt torpedo strike on Washington DC and the radiation that would spread across the entire country, as well as into Canada and Mexico.
Let’s be honest, this kind of attack would result in such retaliation it would effectively end life as we know it. Using a cobalt bomb to start a war would be like blowing up your house to fry an egg. It’d be crazy, it would be insane, and it would probably only ever be used as a last resort.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 “Dr. Strangelove,” the wider world was introduced to the idea of a doomsday device, a concept that had begun appearing in science fiction throughout the 1940s and 1950s but had also gained political interest. As you could probably guess, there’s no coming back from the activation of a doomsday device. Once the ball begins rolling on this device, life on Earth essentially comes to a halt over a relatively short period. There’s no real defined plan for how this would be done, but it’s entirely likely that cobalt bombs would be used. The Soviet Union developed its Dead Hand system, also called Perimeter, which could automatically launch all of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles at once if U.S nuclear missiles were already inbound. And here’s the scary part: it’s thought that at least some of this could be triggered without human input. If that doesn’t sound scarily like Skynet from the Terminator franchise, then I don’t know what does. And to make it all even worse, there are rumors that the system is still active, although the Russians are kind enough to keep it switched off most of the time. There’s absolutely no suggestion that cobalt is being used by the Russians with their bombs in the Dead Hand system, but if a nation wanted to create a doomsday device that they could park in a garage somewhere, just in case somebody fired a nuclear weapon at them and they wanted to end the world, well, it would probably include some cobalt.
While these bombs remain very much a theoretical horror show, their destructive potential is clear for everybody to see. The thing about weapons, and this really is the same for primitive rocks, swords, guns, and nuclear bombs, is that they can be used to strike an opponent without harming yourself. I know that sounds incredibly obvious, but this may well be where the line has been drawn regarding cobalt bombs. Humans have fought and quarreled for as long as we’ve been around, and while the complete destruction of cities and even groups of people has certainly occurred countless times, we generally stop short of destroying absolutely everything. Cobalt bombs may well be too far for even us lunatic humans. It doesn’t matter how much the U.S and Russia loathe and taunt one another, neither side wants to end the world. So, we’re safe for now. Probably. Maybe. Well, let’s just see.
