The Neutron Bomb

In June 1977 an obscure reference to “ERW” in the classified budget of the U.S. Energy Research & Development Administration happened to arouse the curiosity of Congressional & media investigators. “ERW”, it turned out, referred to “enhanced radiation warhead”, which upon further probing referred to a new type of nuclear warhead that emitted bursts of neutrons, not explosives. Such a “Neutron Bomb” could kill everything living in its vicinity while leaving structures undamaged and the landscape uncontaminated.

So secret had been the N-Bomb’s development that even President Jimmy Carter first learned of it from an exposé article in the Washington Post.

What followed were over two years of impassioned discussion within the U.S. government, the NATO alliance, and the Soviet Union about the ethics and practicality of such a device. Was it the “wonder weapon” that would stop any Warsaw Pact invasion in its tracks without the destruction of old, convention nuclear arsenal? Or would its deployment make nuclear war more “thinkable” by erasing the previously-unthinkable nuclear threshold?

The Neutron Bomb details this entire sequence of events, both domestic and international, and examines how and why the world community resolved the problem as it did.

Originally the author’s Ph.D. dissertation in Political Science at the University of California, The Neutron Bomb assumed spy-thriller dimensions: Everyone everywhere was caught by surprise; no one knew what it was safe to say/not say about such a secretive program, and government pronouncements were undercut by gossip within Washington’s Embassy Row. What had begun as an ordinary research project became so explosive that the author found himself in a quandary as to what it was both safe and legal to write! Here, 35 years later, the entire story can be told.