[kniper]

I remember reading somewhere that some of the Allied powers had created a "Cobalt" bomb, a particularly dirty nuclear device. The idea behind it was to halt Soviet armies from marching across Europe in WWIII by creating uninhabitable regions that their troops could not cross.

Well, got me thinking about maybe an updated version of this kind of bomb. What if (and I have no idea if this is possible) we could create a version of that bomb that would only irradiate maybe 1 sq mile for 20 years? This would strike me as being a particularly handy weapon to make dug-in enemy facilities unusable. Consider Iran. Bomb a nuke plant, follow up with a dirty bomb, and suddenly continued uranium production has become extraordinarily difficult.

Assume for the sake of argument no side effects (like wind carrying 1000 miles, wiping out thousands of people, etc). What are your thoughts on this kind of military tactic? Anyone with substantial knowledge on these kinds of things know its feasibility? Discuss plz