mrdownIran could develop nuclear suicide bomb vests, claims JD Vance
ParagoneThere is a minimum-amount of fission-fuel required, AND there is a minimum-amount of conventional-explosives required to compress the fission-fuel until it goes supercritical.
That detonator isn’t going to be small-enough to hide in a vest.
Absolute disinformation.
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Do you actually need conventional explosives? I had the impression all they do is reliably stick the big hunks of radioactive material together in a big bomb that needs to be delivered at high speeds and detonate automatically. Wouldn’t it be enough to quickly shove a cylinder into a bigger core, perhaps with a motor or even a tensioned spring?
That of course doesn’t waive the issue of the amount of fissile material, or the fact it needs to be all put together (you can’t spread it around a vest)
dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️It’s not just reliably sticking the two subcritical halves of fissile material together, but keeping them there via inertia long enough for enough of the mass to go critical before the much more minor reactions blow them apart via melting/vaporizing the nearest surfaces.
If you had to halves of an atomic bomb core and just clacked them together mechanically you’d wind up with a lot of heat and a big old pulse of radiation, and if you were the one holding this device you probably would indeed die. But there would be no nuclear explosion in the sense we think of it as compared to actual functional nuclear weapons. At best you’d wind up with an energy release equivalent to a few pounds of TNT, which would be much easier to replicate with… a few pounds of TNT.
This has been explored to death, e.g. via the Demon Core experiments, where a critical mass of fissile material was brought together via manual means and the end result was the release of enough radiation to kill at least two people (albeit certainly not killing them instantly) but no explosion.
This has been explored to death, e.g. via the Demon Core experiments
If I’m not mistaken, in case of the demon core accidents, the reaction was always interrupted by the experimenter frantically separating the two halves, right? Doesn’t mean it would detonate, but using it as an example of why it wouldn’t doesn’t seem to check out if I’m remembering correctly.
The point is that even bringing the parts together until a critical state was reached, the material did not explode. If the Demon Core were left in its critical state like that but otherwise undisturbed, it surely would have melted but would not have gone off like an atom bomb.
To my understanding, you can’t really do more than bring the parts together in a compact arrangement and keep them like that, so if the demon core would stay together (and not, say, get blown apart by the release of energy), then the issue would be a lack of fissile material (or reflectors), no?
See also an image of a nuclear bomb design (I think Little Boy) from Wikipedia, which illustrates the idea of sliding a rod of fissile material into a hollow cylinder, though the bomb did it in reverse. I think the design might be obsolete due to inefficiency, and it might need the tough shell to hold it together (and act as a neutron reflector).