If it is deployed to NATO forces in Western Europe, it will automatically undermine (some say would wipe out) the credibility of those masses of Soviet tanks in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The neutron bomb in a weapon particularly usable against massed tank formations. This capability is a factor to be weighed in every foreign policy issue affecting Europe. For years it has meant a Soviet capabilty of mounting a massive armored offensive into Western Europe. ![]() This massing of Soviet tanks facing Western Europe is one of the important elements in the power politics of Europe. NATO has 7,000 tanks on its side facing the 19,500. Of these, 12,500 are Soviet tanks in Soviet units. There are 19,500 tanks in the Soviet-controlled forces of the Warsaw Pact aimed at Western Europe. A main feature of that situation is the concentration of the world's biggest-ever tank force deployed in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and aimed at the plains of northern West Germany. Its greater usefulness to the NATO side arises out of the military situation of these times in Europe. It is more useful to the Western allies than it is to the Soviet Union. Predictably, Moscow declared that this was a move "designed to bring the world closer to a nuclear catastrophe."Īnd right on cue all the neutralist political organizations and movements in Western Europe took up the cry and hurled the charge of reckless militarianism at the United States.īecause the neutron bomb "technically an "enhanced radiation weapon") is different in one particularly interesting and important respect from most other modern weapons. Right on cue, from the moment last Sunday when the New York Times broke the story that the decision had been taken (certainly on an intentional leak from high quarters in Washington) the Moscow propaganda machine went into high gear. This past week was the week of the big row. We briefly speculate on the possibility that hadronic cosmic rays originate from the subset of supernovae that collapse to form relativistic outflows and GRBs.Everyone involved in high-level world affairs has known for years that there would be one big row whenever Washington decided to go ahead and build neutron bombs. This is sufficient to account for UHECR generation by GRBs. The luminosity of sources of GRBs and relativistic outflows in L* galaxies such as the Milky Way is at the level of ~10 40+/-1 ergs s -1. Stronger neutrino fluxes and neutron decay halos can be produced by external shocks in clumpy external media and in scenarios involving internal shock scenarios, so detection of neutrinos associated with smooth profile GRBs could rule out an impulsive GRB central engine and an external shock model for the prompt phase. ![]() The decay halo from a single GRB can persist for >~0.1-1 Myr. The peak luminosity emitted by the diffuse β electron halo from a single GRB with >~2×10 53 ergs isotropic energy release is ~10 35 ergs s -1, with a potentially much brighter signal from the neutron decay protons. Galaxies with GRB activity should be surrounded by radiation halos of ~100 kpc extent from the outflowing neutrons, consisting of a nonthermal optical/X-ray synchrotron component and a high-energy gamma-ray component from Compton-scattered microwave background radiation. The radiative characteristics of the neutron β-decay electrons from the GRB ``neutron bomb'' are solved in a special case. ![]() GRBs provide an intense flux of high-energy neutrons, with neutron production efficiencies exceeding ~1% of the total energy release. ![]() The diffuse high-energy GRB neutrino background and the distribution of high-energy GRB neutrino events are calculated for specific parameter sets, and a scaling relation for the photomeson production efficiency in surroundings with different densities is derived. Decay characteristics and radiative efficiencies of the neutral particles that escape from the blast wave are calculated. The evolving synchrotron radiation spectrum in GRB blast waves provides target photons for the photomeson production of neutrinos and neutrons. Implications of this assumption are then derived for the external shock model of GRBs. The hypothesis that ultrahigh-energy (>~10 19 eV) cosmic rays (UHECRs) are accelerated by gamma-ray burst (GRB) blast waves is assumed to be correct.
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