Reynard said:
"To use a nuclear damper against a pure fusion bomb -- which isn't workable with current technology"
If I remember correctly, a fusion bomb is initiated by detonating fission bomb within. The damper would inactivate the fission reaction preventing it from creating a fusion reaction.
Exactly. If the fission trigger is deactivated, the fusion boost can't work.
A hypothetical pure fusion bomb would require some kind of trigger other than a fission bomb, such a the laser compression used for some laboratory fusion. The problem with that is that laser fusion requires a huge laser system, and huge power generation capacity, neither of which fits in a bomb.
Another possibility, with
Traveller science, is some kind of gravitational fusion. Since that is super-science, there's no way to say whether it would fit into a bomb.
Suppose we use a nuclear damper against one of those hypothetical pure fusion bombs. If the damper amplifies the strong force, the hydrogen (and possibly lithium) fuses more easily. It's still not going to fuse without the laser or gravitic trigger, so that doesn't help. But suppose the damper weakens the strong force. In that case, it doesn't fuse even with the trigger, and the bomb fails -- as long as the damper is on when it
tries to trigger.
Reynard said:
I'm still wondering after forty years about the rapid decay aspect of the damper system. My take is the device isn't causing an early explosion but an early release of it's stored radioactive potential bringing the core material below a threshold to go critical. It ages the material's half-life. The bomb can still explode as possibly a dirty bomb but not nuclear or it may be drained enough to be a dud.
The thing there is that the early release of its radioactivity is going to release a bunch of energy. It might detonate the bomb's high explosive trigger, probably not with the precise timing required for an implosion bomb, and probably not the way a gun design bomb would require either. Likely results would be a fizzle bomb or a hot dirty bomb -- both bad things on a planet, but both harmless in space if the damper makes them happen at a distance.
If the bomb's high explosive trigger doesn't trigger (or the bomb uses some other science fiction trigger), the heat of rapid decay melts the fissile material, and the bomb can't trigger properly. Instead it's a miniature meltdown -- and probably wrecks the bomb's guidance system too, so the ship can dodge the blob of meltdown.