The leak that brought the H-bomb debate out of the cold
&gt;Johnson said a lot of things that he shouldn’t have. Even mentioning that there was some research done into “pre-detonating” a bomb would have been classified (I don’t know anything about this, but it would be entirely unsurprising that this idea was looked into).<p>Odd the author says he doesn&#x27;t know about this while claiming to be an expert.<p>This is the start of what would become missile defense, although it&#x27;s phrased in the language of the time, as much of the rest of the article is.<p>Before the infamous &quot;hit a bullet with a bullet&quot; missile tests, and Reagan&#x27;s so-called star wars initiative, the best technology we had was to launch our own nuclear weapon at an incoming weapon, and detonate it close enough that our bomb released enough energy to start the nuclear chain reaction in the incoming bomb, in a way that causes it to fizzle, but not fully explode. The fizzle would be enough to prevent the incoming bomb from fully exploding, causing it&#x27;s own detonation to fizzle (if it managed to survive the fireball&#x2F;blast of the defensive weapon).<p>I believe this was the original reason for seriously studying the neutron bomb, before it became known as the capitalist bomb (since it killed people via acute radiation but largely spared infrastructure), although I don&#x27;t know if this is still speculative or if it&#x27;s been confirmed by any declassified material.<p>This is also part of the reason that even after the various nuclear test treaties went into effect, the US (and I assume others) continue to perform and study sub-critical &#x2F; fizzle explosion tests.