Kurt Feltenberger wrote:
 > 1.  When defending against nuclear missiles, what exactly happens to
 > the nuclear warhead that the damper targets?

Depends on the design of the nuke.
If it's based on an imploding fission primary, increasing the strong
force will prevent fission.

Unfortunately increasing the strong force will enable more fusion events
for deuterium/tritium boosted devices or primary fusion triggered
weapons. The latter should be feasible at typical Traveller tech levels.

Additionally, weapons could have their own damper units to reduce the
required critical mass for fission or pressure/temperature for fusion.
Book 4 introduced the mini-damper units to stabilise californium based
ammunition, after all.

Overall the goal of the damper user is to produce a fizzle as Rupert
Boleyn points out - if the nuclear portions explode sufficiently to
wreck the warhead then you are left with a kinetic kill device.

 > 2.  In one of the various products (or maybe a periodical article from
 > decades back), there was a comment that dampers were used to clean up
 > after nuclear accidents and nuclear attacks.  Again, how would this
 > work?

The contaminants of interest are relatively long-lived fission products.
Induced radioactives created by neutron capture (neutron activation
products) have very short half-lives - so after 30 hours they are 10% of
the initial intensity.

Nuclear dampers would be used to accelerate decay via enhancing the weak
force.

This could be a real problem for living things in the contaminated zone
given the presence of potassium-40 in cells.

2g/kg of an animal's body weight is potassium.
0.012% is potassium-40.
Causing all of this to beta-decay to calcium-40 releases ~750kJ of heat
into each kilo of tissue. Sizzle and splat.

The only saving grace is that K-40 has a half-life of 1.2 billion years.

The typical zoo of fission products have shorter half-lives than that.
Notable examples because of their abundance:
caesium-137: 30 years
strontium-90: 28.8 years

 From Glasstone and Dolan "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" 3d. ed p.19:
"More than 300 different isotopes of 36 light elements, from zinc to
terbium, have been identified among the fission products... The
half-lives of the fission products have been found to range from a small
fraction of a second to something like a million years."

Note that all of a primary may not be consumed in the explosion, so:
plutonium-238: 88 years
Pu-239: 24,000 years
Pu-240: 6,560 years

So the hope is that decay rates can be finely controlled with damper
technology. Dampers are very good sterilisers or anti-personnel weapons
in malicious hands.

Rob O'Connor