Atmospheric transport of neutrons and gamma rays from near-horizon nuclear detonations

This report continues a study of the transport of neutrons and rays from nuclear detonations at high altitudes to a set of detectors, with an emphasis on the limiting case of sources even beyond the horizon. To improve the calculational efficiency, the standard arrangement of a single source with multiple detectors is transformed to an equivalent one with a single detector and sources at multiple locations. Particular attention is paid to the critical problem of transport at near-horizon angles in an atmosphere whose density decreases exponentially with altitude. As a check, calculations for this region are made using both analytical and Monte Carlo approaches. For sources approaching the horizon, the fluence of gamma rays and neutrons reaching the detector drops gradually as the increasing column density attenuates the direct, unscattered fluence. Near the grazing angle, the direct fluence plummets, but the scattered component continues to decrease slowly and remains observable. Over this range, the timedependent flux of direct-plus-scattered gamma rays changes dramatically in both shape and magnitude, but it probably remains distinct from typical natural backgrounds. The neutron time-of-flight spectrum is dominated by scattering and reflects only the most important aspects of the original source spectrum; its most obvious features are a prominent low-energy tail and the resonance structure produced by nuclear interactions in the atmosphere. In some cases, the fluence of secondary gamma rays produced by these interactions may be larger than that from the source itself.