True....
What is most disturbing in my mind is that triggering devices are designed safety in mind.
They enable the DROPPER to get far enough away NOT to be destroyed by the device..
You don't need much of a trigger if the DROPPER is willing to go up with the device..
One could trigger a nuclear event just by pushing two sub critical masses together...then boom
Think about that scenario (gun-type fission weapon). Not only does that require some fancy equipment (albeit nothing like a fusion weapon), but the dropper is going to be moving around a rather lethal amount of nuclear material. Unless these guys build a shield for the core, which would make it quite large, you are going to basically have a bomb that will kill its handlers in short order. But I am just theorizing. Let me ping some people for input.
I think we should let it be known that 30 minutes after a nuclear detonation on American soil caused by muslim terrorists,.... Mecca, Medina, Riyad, and Cairo cease to exist........
Sorry, that's wrong. You'd get a criticality which would be like some C4 going off and a nice blue flash .... but not a BIG BOOM.
You need to explosively compress the mass into a supercriticality and feed it more neutrons.
It is very difficult to create a nuclear explosion. The critical mass has to be assembled quickly. Historically, several criticality accidents have happened without much physical damage at all.
Ummm no.
That statement is in the same category as "irradiated food will kill ya".
Let's let the DU types spread disinformation, shall we? For obvious reasons, no further discussion is appropriate.
There is absolutely no way to cause a nuclear explosion like this.
Not all all. Simply pushing two subcritical masses together to form a supercritical assembly results in a criticality accident, but not an explosion. You get lethal exposures in the immediate vicinity but nothing widespread. This has happened before. Try Googling "Louis Slotin" and read the articles listed there.
Not a lot of people know it, but the key to achieving a high-yield explosion is not just bringing together enough material, but effecting a density change of the material to the point of making the assembled reacting mass really, really, really supercritical, and holding it together for a sufficient time to allow enough reactions to occur to release significant amounts of energy. Since weapons-grade uranium or plutonium is usually in the metallic form, which is incompressible under normal conditions, that is not easy to do in the right way. There is a whole science that deals with the behavior of normally incompressible metals under conditions of high temperature and pressure wherein they behave as compressible fluids (radiation hydrodynamics). Not the kind of knowledge your average mujahadeen is likely to have at his fingertips.
Not a nuclear explosion -- a burst of raidiation and the orbs melt to subcrit.