Fact

[m10bob]

There has never been a weapon invented, which has not been used.

[Big B]

ORIGINAL: m10bob

There has never been a weapon invented, which has not been used.

And I thought you were going to say blonds have more fun! [:D]

[Dili]

N-Bomb.
 
Many CW and Bio weapons.

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: Dili

N-Bomb.

Many CW and Bio weapons.

N-Bombs used twice. CW used many times. Bio used also, unsure how many times. Is this what you meant?

[Panther Bait]

Who used n-bombs? Let alone twice?  Or are you considering testing = used?

[keeferon01]

ORIGINAL: m10bob

There has never been a weapon invented, which has not been used.

My wife left hook thank god

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

ORIGINAL: Dili

N-Bomb.

Many CW and Bio weapons.

N-Bombs used twice. CW used many times. Bio used also, unsure how many times. Is this what you meant?

Dili meant neutron bombs - and they have indeed never been used. Dili is also correct that vast numbers of bw and cw agents have never been used. The Russians have some really nasty ones - you better hope they never are used - if you or your decendents are to live on this planet.

[witpqs]

I thought Dili meant CW and bio as categories. And, obviously, I thought he wrote N-bombs to mean 'nuclear bombs'.

If you mean specific weapons not used - plenty of them have been invented and tested, but not used per se.

[DuckofTindalos]

Hydrogen bombs haven't been used either.

[el cid again]

Nor have any of the fourth category of wmd - RW - radiological weapons. A great deal of work was done on these during WWII - in Germany, Japan and the idea was proposed in the USA - it was listed above atomic bombs as a most likely product of the Manhattan Project by the National Academy of Sciences - and that project indeed included a formal proposal by Enrico Fermi to Oppenheimer for a weapon (I have a copy of the letter if anyone wants to see it). After the war, both the USSR and the USA engaged in extensive research and testing - and the US tests were finally declassified (I have the declassified reports if anyone wants to see them - redacted reports = some words blacked out). RW are the least deadly of wmd, remarkably similar to cw and bw in the way they are influenced by weather, and in addition they degrade (some faster than others) over time. Curiously enough, Dili's N (neutron) bomb was the ONLY practical outcome of US work in this area - they ultimately concluded that only an atomic explosion could make enough radiation to matter on a battlefield. But even in that form, they have never been used. The Japanese were the only nation in WWII to come close to using a rw weapon - and one may have been tested on an islet off Korea in August 1945. This is the event sometimes called an "atom bomb test" - reported by the IJA security chief to US Army intelligence - and later disclosed to a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution (see the beginning of Japan's Secret War for full text). Even if my interpretation, that this small weapon must be radiological vice fission, is correct, testing is not use.

[Dili]

I thought Dili meant CW and bio as categories.

 
Not when i put "Many".
 
A-bomb is what i read in english literature to mean atomic bombs. N-bomb means Neutron bomb.
 
 
--------------------------------------
 
In a sense m10bob has reason. In Human psyche the effects of N-bomb other CWs/Bio are probably put in same bag of A-bomb and Gas.
Also all of them have been used in Hollywood and that maybe counts too.
Of course i have no doubts that an Al-Qaeda nutcase will use them if it has a chance. 

[Panther Bait]

Yes, I was assuming that Dili meant Neutron bombs, not Nuclear.
 
The original statement also depends a lot on how broad you make your definition of weapon.  Certainly there are individual weapon systems were never used.  For instance, F-22s have not been used (at least I don't think they have participated in combat operations, yet), but obviously jet fighters have.  Even a neutron bomb is, at its heart, just a nuclear bomb that has been modified to produce enhanced radiation effects along with the standard, although reduced, blast and thermal effects.

[el cid again]

The chief US neutron bomb designer has a book out saying they are not really "reduced" in normal effects - and they are not very practical in terms of thinking "we will kill people but not blast up the area." His comments were based on actual test results - and he regarded them as a probably misunderstood - and ultimately failed - technical concept. Which ironically is a more general case for all radiological weapons. They were not very successful. [Neutron bombs, while technically classical nuclear weapons, were an outgrowth - and the only fully weaponized outgrowth - of US rw research]

And I was wrong to say rw was never used. They were not used as a military weapon. But the US military (specifically USN and USAF) flew THOUSANDS of sortees (low thousands) using NON-military bw bombs during the Korean War (putting more truth than I like in communist claims we used rw in that war). This was a very secret program not intended to hurt the enemy, but simply to test a weapon for the CIA for use in "peacetime" in the Cold War. The tests were not promising enough and the weapons were not later used. But I guess we have to say that sort of "testing" - on real people in an enemy country - is real use.

[witpqs]

ORIGINAL: Dili

I thought Dili meant CW and bio as categories.

Not when i put "Many".

A-bomb is what i read in english literature to mean atomic bombs. N-bomb means Neutron bomb.

I thought you meant that there were many kinds and none had been used. I've read A-bomb before, but first time I saw N-bomb. [8D]

[Panther Bait]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

The chief US neutron bomb designer has a book out saying they are not really "reduced" in normal effects - and they are not very practical in terms of thinking "we will kill people but not blast up the area." His comments were based on actual test results - and he regarded them as a probably misunderstood - and ultimately failed - technical concept. Which ironically is a more general case for all radiological weapons. They were not very successful. [Neutron bombs, while technically classical nuclear weapons, were an outgrowth - and the only fully weaponized outgrowth - of US rw research]

I think I read somewhere that neutron bombs were at least partially intended to be used against massed soviet armored formations. Apparently, tanks were considered poor targets for conventional nukes since the armor made them much more survivable to the thermal and blast effects, particularly if they were equipped with NBC gear. The enhanced neutron radiation in the n-bombs was much less affected by the armor, thereby increasing the weapons lethality against armored formations. They also talked about the blast and thermal effects not being much reduced over standard nukes as well, and that the whole "kills people and leaves buildings intact" idea was a misinterpretation of the weapon's effects by the popular media.

[el cid again]

The designer says that was the idea, but the reality never came close to implementing it. They tried lots of variations, but in the end politics demanded a weapon be fielded without much regard for what it would really do. This is very common in nuclear weapons: technicians and engineers can tell many stories about how contractors or services reason "it will never be used anyway - no one will ever know." The first Polaris A-1 SSBN subs went to sea (this is no longer a secret) without warheads - because of a technical problem we knew the warheads could not work: but we figured "the Russians won't call our bluff, they won't know." [This is bad practice. Particularly admitting it later: you don't want to get a reputation for bluffing with an empty hand in the nuclear business.] USAF eventually gave up trying to show a Minuteman missile can launch from an operational silo (ALL launches are above ground from Vandenberg test gantries]. They tried and failed - in front of Congressional observers - three times. [Any engineer will tell you a complex system that has never worked, and that has actually failed multiple times, needs to be tested before you trust it. USAF just declared victory - it never tested the system - and it probably still does not work. See "The Button" for details.
Again - bad practice. It strikes at the heart of deterrence theory: credibility. Not that I believe in deterrence theory - but officially we are supposed to - and it is ironic how many things are done that are inconsistent with it. It was estimated that the USSR would lose 2/3 of its planned missile strikes do to own system failures. That was publicized occasionally. They don't often tell you we think 1/3 of ours will fail for the same cause - and that on the systems we don't know are 100% down - witness early Polaris or Minuteman. The world of modern nuclear theory is bizzare, irrational, and full of amazing tales most people would never dare to make up - because they are so implausable.]