I am thinking about how the US detonated its Hiroshima nuke about 45 seconds after dropping it from the plane, and how it was detonated, as designed I believe, about 1/3 mile above Hiroshima.
In the 80s a Titan 2 ICBM in the south actually exploded in its silo from a fuel mishap. The missile had a full hydrogen bomb on board and it was blown out of the silo and into a nearby field, still intact and unexploded. So in practice we've seen there's low risk for an unintended chain reaction. This is a great documentary on the incident: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/command-an...
For a non-critical bomb exploding the bomb material actually has a pretty short half life on the order of a few decades or so I believe, so even if you did nothing at all the debris would naturally decay down to background levels fairly quickly (i.e. it would not be some catastrophic thing that ruins a part of the planet for centuries).
I'm not sure what the plans are for making new weapons in a few decades as the current ones decay into uselessness--there's likely some kinda provision in nuclear weapon treaties.
You are probably thinking of the tritium neutron trigger, which has a half-life of 12 years and has to be replenished to keep the warhead operational.
Edit: s/Europes/German. Don't know about other european countries. And would think of it as unlikely for Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain itself. They wouldn't import from there, and keep the good stuff for themselves, anyway :-)
For "proper" dirty bomb, the warhead would have to be exploded either by hit from AA weapons or by misfiring with damaged warhead but if AA just put some holes in missile and disabled propulsion it could be much less dangerous
It's very very hard to hit a missile in flight. Trying to target just the propulsion is even harder. An admirable goal, but in the moment, especially because a lot of missiles are cluster munition and in a nuclear strike there's going to be multiple missiles flying all over the place.... Yes... just hit the propulsion. Heck, just target the guidance computer. Even better, just hit the CPU. Problem solved. Hopefully they figured that out.
EMP should do it. But otherwise, your point taken.
It may be possible that a missel is disabled and when it hits the ground, produces a much lower yield explosion than designed for, in particular a plutonium device, if I recall the video and extrapolate with sufficient accuracy
If it were to crash into the ground, be blown up by an intercepting missile, or otherwise malfunction, you'll just get a normal-bomb-sized regular conventional explosion and a bunch of toxic and only mildly radioactive plutonium strewn all over the place.
The true damage is caused by societal and economic overreaction from the target: fear leads to expensive security theatre, a desire for vengeance leads to lashing out with expensive unnecessary wars, uncertainty and political instability destabilizes financial markets, etc.
Some diseases are similar: immune system overreaction causes more harm than the actual invader.
I don’t think that’s correct, and do not see that Wikipedia page say that. It says
“The purpose of the weapon is to contaminate the area around the dispersal agent/conventional explosion with radioactive material, serving primarily as an area denial device against civilians.”
I think that “serving primarily as an area denial device against civilians.” isn’t 100% correct. For use by terrorists, I think it’s more to instill fear than to make areas inaccessible to civilians (that still would happen, but isn’t the goal)
Definitely a lot "better" than a nuclear explosion, but it's no picnic to have fragments of a destroyed nuclear warhead to be scattered around.
I'm hypothesizing that a falling plutonium warhead might experience more kinetic energy on impact with the ground, such that the fissible material would still chain react, more so than the example given in the video of bringing them together with one's hands.
Rockets aren't built to be robust because that adds mass, which requires more fuel and reduces acceleration. Better to just go faster, avoid the danger. But that means any damage to the rocket is probably going to doom it.
Here's what those look like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...
Why?
The primary in a thermonuclear bomb needs careful timing of the conventional charge. But don't they go to a lot of trouble to ensure that conventional charge dowsn't go off except under the correct control? The detonators are timed and triggered electronically. The charges are not like nitrogycerin, they won't go off on impact.
I don't see why damaging the delivery vehicle should affect the bomb, unless the vehicle explodes catastrophically, destroying the bomb. And unless, I suppose, there's a failsafe installed, so that a malfunctioning vehicle automatically disables the bomb. That would make sense to me; I don't want my ICBM exploding over some place that wasn't on the target-list.
Basically, I want a warhead that goes off correctly over the target, or not at all. That appears to be a fairly straightforward engineering challenge; as they say, it's not rocket science.
That is not an engineering challenge but rather the natural state of nuclear warheads. If your device works perfectly, you get a nuclear explosion, if it does not, you don't, at best you get a fizzle that does a tiny fraction of the intended output. Of course, you do scatter some radioactive material around.
It would be a very interesting engineering challenge to design a nuclear warhead that can do a partial detonation even if damaged by some AA, but I don't think anyone has done that.
Apparently, the British managed, albeit inadvertently. In the 1950's they did not have access to American research on the behaviour of plutonium under extreme conditions any longer, so they to increase yield they built fission bombs with a larger amount of fissile material. There was the risk that during a crash landing and fire the conventional explosives cooking off would cause a fission reaction at a substantial fraction of design yield, consequently the cavity was filled with ball bearings to be removed only immediately before actual use.
They will most likely go off if the warhead gets exploded tho.
I doubt they test how the nuclear bombs react to getting shredded by AA
They don't need to bother testing against conventional AA because of how unlikely it is to ever happen.
Something like a Russian ZHU has an effective range of 1.4 km
A reentry vehicle travels around Mach 13 or 4km/s so it will only be in effective range for 350 milliseconds. Good luck shooting it down. You won't even be able to track the thing and it would just be the luckiest blind shot in the world.
That said, special extremely low sensitivity explosives are used in nukes now a days, so it’s not clear the explosives themselves would go off at all, correct.
Either way, it’s decently likely a cloud of plutonium or enriched weapons grade uranium will be released. Not ideal.
Not as big a deal as one would expect though.
Sure, I don't want to standing under a kilo of plutonium when it gets transformed into dust.
But the thing was supposed to detonate at (say) 8,000 ft; presumably it's intercepted well above that altitude. The dust is going to be spread over a wide area, and I suspect the excess deaths are likely to be about zero.
Compared to a 100 kiloton to 5 megaton explosion, it’s nothing.
Yes, because even without the nuke it's a respectable sized bomb and you don't want one "just going off" when someone crashes an aircraft or has a missile silo fire or whatever, even more so when it's likely to spray plutonium all over the place which is likely to be an expensive facility or vessel you care about not causing downtime for.
You no longer have a reentry vehicle, you now have a man-made meteorite burning up in the atmosphere.
I can sleep peacefully at night knowing that North Korea doesn't have a chance in hell of nuking Seattle because I have some understanding of how stupidly hard it is to keep a reentry vehicle from turning into a meteorite.
The flip side though is how stupidly hard it is to intercept something going that fast.
This is one reason people stress missile defense that hits the nuke immediately over their launch site (boost phase).
For NK that might mean interceptor UAVs hovering off the Korean coast or ships. But for Russia or China it means a Starlink-style system with hypersonic interceptors staged in orbit around the globe.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency
This obviously has tons of flaws though. It would cause a feedback increase in nuclear stockpiling to counteract the fraction intercepted to ensure MAD.
How would it know? You can't have radar on it, because that would make it easier to hone in on, aiding interception.
Also, on re-entry most objects have a highly ionized shock-wave around them, making forward facing radio communications quite difficult at best (assuming you could manage the cooling, etc)
Also separately, communication/radar works fine through reentry plasma once you go up to 20-50 GHz frequency.
If the interceptor misses the nuke's location by 50 microseconds it'll explode harmlessly a foot behind it. (The ICBM is probably traveling faster than the shockwave front of the explosive, depending on where it is)
I don't think a radar from satellite could be that precise, that fast, and get a signal out.
A nuclear device is an spherical array of them, all focused inward. If any of them goes first, it pushes things out of the way, and you get a "fizzle"
You also have to shower things with a neutron pulse at just the right time to kick off the chain reaction.... while all the inbound hypersonic jets of goo are in flight.
I'm amazed they were ever able to pull it off, let alone make them reliable.
- some will explode in the mid air with full force
- some will explode in the mid air with reduced force
- some will disassemble on the intercept and won’t explode at all
- some will fall to the ground and explode with variety level of force
- some will fall and won’t explode at all
- some will fall to the seas and rivers and may explode much later and make all other kinds of problems
A nuclear device has to go through a very specific, very precise sequence in order to create a nuclear or thermonuclear explosion. Conventional weapons don’t have this same design, and so could easily demonstrate your observed behavior.
Without the firing sequence occurring, a nuclear bomb that is intercepted early becomes a dirty bomb. The nuclear material is spread out over a much smaller blast zone and can contaminate the area with fissile material. But the odds of it producing a nuclear explosion are virtually nil unless the bomb/missile has explicit countermeasures that force a detonation prior to intercept.
Cruise missiles are intercepted by a rocket exploding in front of it. As we know (for example from the MH17 investigation) - the major damage is done by shrapnel from the intercepting rocket.
The level to which the incoming missile is damaged by shrapnel will very - it can be very slight damage by just a few elements, or a very heavy one.
We don't know how the nuclear warhead is configured. It is sensible to predict, that the detonation mid-air over enemy territory is the desired outcome. So the light damage may start the detonation sequence by design.
Hypersonic missiles are much harder to destroy because the timing needs to be much more precise. It means that the rocket may receive much lighter damage, which increases the chances of starting the detonation sequence and exploding before hitting the ground.
- some will "negativey" launch and fall back at the launch site
- some will "negatively" stabilize and crash early at unpredictable point midflight, sometimes in a field or over a populated part of Belgorod or other border city in russia.
In either case the detonation is not supposed to happen by design but the russian sur-reality gives no guarantees. They know this themselves which does not mean anyone there would take responsibility for this, god forbid.
I think you're safe enough to upvote this.
If it hits propulsion of the missile, then falls on the ground and the detonation circuit goes "right, that's good enough, let's explode"...
Cruise missiles are an entirely different thing and largely irrelevant when it comes to delivery of nuclear weapons.
However, US has such capabilities, and I think the results would still be very similar with the only difference that ballistic warhead (or its parts if disintegrated) will land not that far from the target when intercepted after the apex.
I just wanted to tell that intercepted missiles resulted in different outcomes - they go off course, explode right away, disintegrate and fall in big parts, fall and explode, or fall almost intact without exploding.
When it comes to ballistic missile interceptions, they tend to occur (if they occur) at a minimum of tens of kilometers from/above the target.
Ballistic missile interceptions are fundamentally different from cruise missile interceptions too, cruise missiles are often disabled by shrapnel from the interceptor merely exploding near the missile. This isn't a great approach for terminal phase ballistic missiles, so for those you mostly see kinetic interceptors that actually have to directly hit their target. In the case of a successful interception, you're unlikely to see anything but disintegration.
In all of these cases, a successful intercept will happen tens if not thousands of kilometers from the target.
A boost phase interception would happen above the launch area. A midcourse intercept would essentially happen in space and a terminal intercept would happen at the edge of the atmosphere.
I'd recommend reading about Aegis, THAAD and GMD. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_flight_phase...
Of course there are also stealth bombers and cruise missiles. In the case of stealth bombers, you either shoot them before the bombs are dropped or you don't (Barring some extremely conveniently located point defenses, like C-RAM)
Cruise missiles? Shot down by conventional air defenses hundreds of kilometers from the target if terrain allows.
Hypersonic cruise missiles? Maybe shot down by conventional air defenses.
1 - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/303337/command-and-...
i kept trying to remember the 'nuclear author' i saw at a reading somewhere many-ish years ago, but couldn't figure out who, where, when.
This is the book, if i had to guess:
Nuclear Nightmares
Securing the World Before It Is Too Late
Joseph Cirincione
Columbia University Press
I never read it, but I came away with the impression the guy knew what he was talking about.
This video of the author doing a reading in DC seems familiar, but it doesn't fit my timeline:
https://www.politics-prose.com/video/nuclear-nightmares
I do remember asking whatever author it was this question:
What is more dangerous, nukes or global warming?
Author said 'nukes' and i thought to myself, 'Wrong'.
Today I've changed my mind -- it's def nukes. Or global warming.
I saw Daniel Ellsberg talk about nukes once, too -- he had the audience close our eyes, then he counts down from 30 seconds (the approximate amount of time from when the bomb is dropped until it detonates -- tho i guess it was actually 45 seconds) -- and he counts down, am about we set it to go off about about 8.15am, so it might inflict maximum damage and terror, kids and moms might still be rushing to/from school, people headed to work, etc. -- just kind of like another regular slow war day in Japan -- until it wasn't.
The Dead Hand by David Hoffman is also amazing and covers chemical and bio weapons as well. It has a good bit on the struggle to contain all of the chem/bio/nuke weapons when the USSR was falling apart.
Scenario II: Your defenses knocked out the warhead's delivery system, but did not damage the actual (small, tough) nuclear warhead or its control systems badly enough to disable those. My bet is that the standard design spec. is "when fully armed and near-ish to the target(s), if a critical failure occurs in the delivery system, then detonate immediately". Hopefully your missile defenses intercepted it far, far away from anything that you care much about.
https://youtu.be/uY-u1qyRM5w?t=2800
Anyway the original bomb had a lot of detonators all around that needed to be fired right. Modern ones have only two, from the little I've seen in published imagery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_%28nuclear_weapon%29#Safet...
One hopes this is arranged so simultaneous firing of both detonators results in a fizzle, and a precise stagger is needed. Either way though, an external explosive force will just disassemble the thing, not cause it to go off.
1. Work out how to do the precise implosion you describe for the plutonium bomb - very difficult, and required the trinity test to verify
2. Separating enough of the the correct isotope to make the uranium bomb - the science for this was a solved problem, it was just about big engineering
Measure the flight profile, estimate the mass, compare the heat signature, etc. Perhaps even radiation? Could a "Star wars" system actually gain some statistical advantage given it doesn't have the resources to shoot down every missile?
It's best if the missile can be disabled during the boost phase before it ever deploys the warhead and decoys.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_aid [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_flight_phase...
But yes, best to do it before the missile debusses the warheads. Which is partly the point of GMD: yes, it's name has mid-course, but part of the point is that it pushes the point between post-boost and mid-course much closer to launch, which results in the warheads being released earlier and farther from the targets, which makes them less accurate.
Another part of BMD that isn't commonly appreciated is that Aegis/SM-3 has sufficient performance to cover about half of the US.
Generally you need to create sufficient neutron flow of neutrons of very specific energy to start fission chain reaction. This happens by bringing more of the fissile material together - more neutrons cause more fissile reactions, leading to more neutrons-boom. An explosive fission will push matter away. If you create an explosion that parts the fissile material before most of the nuclei have split, it’s a dud. To get a really high yield you have to shape the geometry of the fissile material very precisely at a very specific moment so that most of the nuclei get flow of neutrons at exactly correct energy. It does not suffice to bring heat to nuclear material, or just lump it randomly together, you need to be very precise so that there is enough of the fissile at the right place at the right time.
The non-nuclear detonators explosives in nukes serve two purposes: push the fissile material together fast enough, and shape the fissile material just-so due to the pressure effect. It’s really, really inmprobable to trigger the nuke by a random explosion other than the trigger one.
Like, some designs were “one point unsafe”, but could be this exploited deliberately as counter-ABM protection? Or: we know that there were many efforts to allow nuclear warheads to detonate simultaneously and close to each other (so neutron flux from earlier detonations would not disrupt other devices’ firing sequences), but how exactly it relates to ABM protection? And so on and so on.
Exact solutions are classified, and what we can learn from unclassified sources is mostly a speculation.
Bare in mind that no one has actually managed to intercept
Difference between Ballistic & Cruise missile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG0OOQr2bbw
What Happens If You Try To Shoot Down A Nuclear Missile Mid-Air? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEjw-hbcbSY
Lots of references in there, some seem to answer your question.