Speculation: Particle beam catalysed fission bomb?

I highly doubt this would work well. Something like what you're talking about is used for initiating the nuclear chain reaction at the optimal time ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_generator ), but if you tried to continuously drive a subcritical atomic bomb this way, your particle beam would require instantaneous power within a couple orders of magnitude of the instantaneous power produced by the bomb itself. Standard supercritical atomic bombs benefit from exponential increase of the reaction rate over very short timescales, which allows a lot of fission to happen before the bomb disassembles.

This page has a lot of information about general principles that has been derived from publicly available sources. Start here: nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq2.html It goes more in-depth if you go back to the main index.

At that point we may as well make a laser driven inertial confinement fusion drive and call it a day.

I think the intention is to be able to get to higher temperatures, making fusion practical for something other than Deuterium + Tritium.  (At least that is why I would want to do it).

In space, I would salt my pure fusion weapons cause why not, I force them to EMP harden their ships and spend more on medical and armour

...what?

Okay, one, I am very glad that you're not in charge of any real-life military assets, because I'm fairly certain that violates some part of the Geneva Conventions.  Two, EMP does not work like that.  To quote the relevant Atomic Rockets article:


So nukes aren't going to produce EMP in space, and EMP weapons in general are fairly easy to defend against even if you're dealing with a mass budget, and military hardware comes radiation- and EMP-hardened by default anyways, and fiber optics are completely immune to EMP effects, so don't expect to do anything with your enhanced nukes.  Plus you can just stick more radiation/EMP armor over a box holding all of the really sensitive electronics and squishy flesh things (which, given our crew compartments, we do anyways), and voila! completely immune with minimal effort and added mass.

Third, a salted nuke is going to be even less effective than a regular nuke in combat.  First because a salted nuke needs to be tuned to produce lots and lots of neutron radiation, which is usually shielded against with relatively low-density hydrogen-rich compounds but also boron, which most of us use in multiple-centimeter-thick layers as main armor anyways, and second because a salted nuke is just a neutron bomb plus a lining such as cobalt-59, which gets transmuted into the cobalt-60 by the nuke, and there is not a chance in hell you're going to be able to pack enough cobalt onto there to compensate for how quickly it'll disperse into nothing (remember that the "salt" density is going to decrease by the square with every meter of linear distance from the target and that the radiation flux will decrease at the same rate).  At least without making it into a giant target the size of a gunship that can be targeted by PD coilguns from about fifty kilometers out.

It's cheaper, easier, and less commity-war-crimesy to just stick with fusion nukes.