50kt means they’ve mastered ‘boosting’. Nuclear boosting means injecting tritium right before the conventional explosives go off. This ‘boosts’ the yields up due to neutron reaction from fusion of the tritium inside.
There is no reason to ‘salt’ anything with cobalt. At 50kt, salting is useless. It won’t convert anything to an isotope in the needed amounts. You have to move up to thermonuclear 2 or 3 stage. In that case, you want to use U-238 for the ‘dirty’ version and never anything else. Why? It’ll fission as well as U-235 and increase the yield per kg of the bomb and will also spew all the fallout you would ever want from a ‘cobalt salted bomb’.
but I’m confused as to why a peaceful nuclear program would have creation of explosions as a design goal.
The Iranians did say their program was peaceful in nature, didn’t they?
I guess they were not entirely candid in their previous
assurances.
So, is a “boosted” bomb considered an A-Bomb, an H-Bomb, or a hybrid?