thatcrowCould a nuclear bomb be delivered and detonated via a truck or boat?
Yes, but at this point it would be cheaper and quicker to have spacex fly to orbit, capture a 5 ton rock and drop it on a city.
There’s a reason Iran has been ‘weeks’ from making a bomb for decades now.
That would be a really shitty nuke. Like around 1% of a Davy Crockett.
Use a bigger rock. I might change the cost by hundreds of millions, and still be less than the billions in development and production for a nuke.
Where do you get these rocks though? There is actually a similar concept that uses tungsten rods instead of rocks.
But the entire thing isn’t really practical. If you want the ability to strike any place on earth in a reasonable time, you have to have hundreds of tungsten rod equipped satellites (or rocks with rocket engines attached to them) in orbit.
I’m not sure it would actually be cheaper then just using nukes on ballistic missiles.
The expense of a delivering the nuke is negligible in comparison to the cost and effort of building a nuke. So much so, that large rocks are more economical than building a nuke at this point.
Building nukes isn’t that expensive. The most expensive part is probably building the enrichment facilities, but that’s a one-time investment. Once you have all the material, a nuke isn’t that complicated to build. A bunch of students basically designed one that was deemed to be functional.
Launching hundreds, possibly thousands of multi-ton projectiles into orbit is extremely expensive. And of course you have to maintain them in space somehow, possibly for decades. Either that or you have to de-orbit and replace them, which would mean regularly bombarding the ocean or some desert …
It’s just not practical. Even if it was I highly doubt it would be cheaper.
How two students built an A-bomb
It's one of the burning questions of the moment: how easy would it be for a country with no nuclear expertise to build an A-bomb? Forty years ago in a top-secret project, the US military set about finding out. Oliver Burkeman talks to the men who solved the nuclear puzzle in just 30 months