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Comment by sroussey | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully has protection from disassembly.

Oh, it does. The kind that self-disables via detonation if conditions are met that trigger what it believes is an intrusion or unauthorized disassembly attempt.

To be clear the "detonation" is NOT the nuclear material going critical, or even a "dirty bomb" type explosion. It is akin to thermite on the electrical firing ICs/circuits to completely destroy the intelligent logic of managing the conventional explosives that triggers the nuclear material.

The fissile material would still be available to build another bomb. You don't even need to use them, just disappearing the weapons and insinuating you know where they are is a powerful threat.

Somewhat. If you don't have the knowledge (math and skills) you really can only threaten a dirty bomb in the worst case. Al-Qaeda did that for years. We didn't know if they were bullshitting or not until way later (they were full of shit).

Nukes make terrible dirty bombs the isotopes in questions are very stable and not highly radioactive, for a dirty bomb you want isotopes with a fairly short lifetime of years/decades.

PU239 has a half life of 24,110 years and that's your best case for a dirty bomb, if the core is U235 then it has a half life of 703,800,000 years which means when it's not in any substantial mass in which the nuclear decay is can to turn into a chain reaction it's about as radioactive as cat litter or a banana.

With 50 bombs to learn from, I would be amazed if the clever engineers in charge wouldn’t find a way past those measures given enough time and money

So you create the intrusion, then you can extract the various sub-critical pieces that if combined precisely (in position and in time) creates a nuclear explosion.

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