Kurt Feltenberger <mailto:xxxxxx@thepaw.org> asked:

>     I've been contemplating a scenario where nuclear dampers are used and
>     had some questions regarding their deployment and effects.
>
>     1.  what exactly happens to the nuclear warhead that the damper targets?

IMHO, as Rupert Boleyn wrote, the HE goes off but the fission part doesn't. See below.

>     2.  How [do nuclear dampers] work?
>     It would seem like this is something akin to Dr. Feelgood's Fallout and Half-Live
>     accelerator tonic in that it somehow accelerates decay to an absurd speed.

I think that's only part of it.

Consider a fission bomb which has failed to detonate and has strewn highly radioactive
  'stuff'
(HRS - eg the Plutonium) all over a landscape.

As Rupert said, merely accelerating the decay of the HRS just leaves you with a different problem
- all the radiation of
  the warhead comes out into landscape just as if you'd done nothing.
It just takes eg a day or two rather than 50 years (or whatever, these numbers are by no means
precise). Anyway, you still have a highly radioactive landscape to deal with. Actually the
landscape is *more* radioactive than if you'd left things alone, because there's been no time
for the newly radioactive bits of landscape to decay.

I suggest that part of what nuclear dampers *can* do is to encourage/force decay modes which produce
vastly less damaging radiation, decay products, and so on. To grab an example completely out of thin
air, in a fission weapon Pu-239 absorbs a slow neutron, becoming Pu-240 and then fissions, emitting
lots of energy and more neutrons. A nuclear damper might work by stabilizing the Pu-240 and enabling
a high-probability path where it absorbs more neutrons and/or alpha particles, eventually becoming
Pu-244, which is stable.

Or the damper might encourage Pu-239 to decay by alpha particle emission, becoming U-235 (this
process does not, as I read things, release extra neutrons or lots of energy).

Handwave some process as appropriate for thr U-235 (alpha capture followed by fast neutron emission
to turn it into U-238?).

As a pragmatic side point, if you're going to do this then you are probably going to produce lots
of heat, so you probably want lots of water (or something) around to soak this up.

Now if you have the technology to do this, you have the technology to stop a fission reaction in
its tracks, which is how you deal with an incoming warhead.

Hope this is useful to someone, at least as food for thought.

Jonathan