There 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.
I mean, the W54 was small enough to be carried by a person and I don’t think anyone wants even a 1kt device going off near them. So it’s within the realm of possibility even if it does strain credulity as an actual goal Iran was working toward (let alone a solid justification for this bullshit).
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)
There’s a difference between meltdown, inefficient/low explosion, & efficient high-explosion.
The neutron-emission’s cascading only when the critical-mass is in small-enough a volume,
& the heat it’s producing is making it blow-apart.
( I’ve seen video of 1 million watts of heat being produced by a 1-cubic-metre reactor-core, in a water-cooled reactor… the heat the reaction produces makes the fuel-rods incandescent, or at-least that’s the way it looked, in that video: it may have been Cherenkhov-radiation that I was seeing, or from gamma-rays being converted down to light or something… dunno… )
the more efficient you want the fission-reaction to be, the longer you have to force it together, while it’s blowing-up.
It is stupid for even more reasons than that. I’ve thought about it back when North Korea had pretend nuclear suicide bombers march on their military parade.
Even if somehow they manage to cram one in a backpack that is carriable by a person, there is no advantage whatsoever given the blast radius. You will have to use a vehicle of sorts to get near the enemy and more importantly away from your friendlies anyway. Whatever distance you can cover on foot afterwards won’t make much of a difference. Might as well make it vehicle borne.
Also the whole point of a suicide vest is to be able to get in the middle of an unaware crowd or near your target before using it. With a nuke you don’t need to be in the middle of a targeted crowd or get that close to your target to have an effect.
There 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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I mean, the W54 was small enough to be carried by a person and I don’t think anyone wants even a 1kt device going off near them. So it’s within the realm of possibility even if it does strain credulity as an actual goal Iran was working toward (let alone a solid justification for this bullshit).
Edit: the W54 weighed 51lb (23 kg).
He’s talking about a dirty bomb. And, technically, that is quite possible and doable by the Iranians.
It’s a stupid assertion, yes; but the engineering is plausible.
I mean, yeah, the Davie Crockett could fit in a back pack, a really big back pack
JD should stick to fucking couches, not nuclear physics.
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)
There’s a difference between meltdown, inefficient/low explosion, & efficient high-explosion.
The neutron-emission’s cascading only when the critical-mass is in small-enough a volume,
& the heat it’s producing is making it blow-apart.
( I’ve seen video of 1 million watts of heat being produced by a 1-cubic-metre reactor-core, in a water-cooled reactor… the heat the reaction produces makes the fuel-rods incandescent, or at-least that’s the way it looked, in that video: it may have been Cherenkhov-radiation that I was seeing, or from gamma-rays being converted down to light or something… dunno… )
the more efficient you want the fission-reaction to be, the longer you have to force it together, while it’s blowing-up.
The explosives are required, for bombs, ttbomk.
_ /\ _
It is stupid for even more reasons than that. I’ve thought about it back when North Korea had pretend nuclear suicide bombers march on their military parade.
Even if somehow they manage to cram one in a backpack that is carriable by a person, there is no advantage whatsoever given the blast radius. You will have to use a vehicle of sorts to get near the enemy and more importantly away from your friendlies anyway. Whatever distance you can cover on foot afterwards won’t make much of a difference. Might as well make it vehicle borne.
Also the whole point of a suicide vest is to be able to get in the middle of an unaware crowd or near your target before using it. With a nuke you don’t need to be in the middle of a targeted crowd or get that close to your target to have an effect.