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The Traveller nuclear damper works by weakening the strong nuclear force and causing the nuclei of the warhead to, kinda, fall apart at a molecular level.
It stops fission from the shed of neutrons, that prevents the chain reaction.
It stops fusion by keeping the two hydrogen nuclei from sticking together well enough to form a helium atom and that prevents the release of energy normally associated with it.
In a real world nuke, that'd keep it from working because all of our fusion weapons use a fission explosion to get the heat/pressure up far enough to force the fusion reaction.
In Traveller, many warheads dispense with the fission stage and use the insanely miraculous gravity manipulation technology to say to two H atoms, "now kiss!"
Under a damper, they bump into each other and...
Well the grav pinch is still happening, but where's the kaboom?
Since the grav pinch is designed to happen once and briefly, I speculate that you end up with a warhead with dead capacitors and burned out grav plates with a capsule of tritium in the center.
For some reason this reminds me of Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series, when technology was largely replaced by magic. I asked a friend of mine's father, a distinguished professor of physics and an sf fan, what he thought of the idea. He loved the stories, and he thought the technology was "possible, but not probable". YMMV.
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