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Pastimes : Nuke in a Box

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To: Real Man who wrote (5)11/12/2001 12:31:10 PM
From: William H Huebl  Read Replies (1) of 89
 
Boy are you leading a sheltered life.

It is not "critical mass" as you say... or just putting enough metal in one place so that the number of active reactions increase exponentially. It is "critical DENSITY."

So given weapons grade plutonium and a surrounding charge of high explosives, you gotta nuke! The amount of metal has been variously given as 1 pound or 1 kg (2.2 pounds). The Hiroshima bomb, if I remember the recent documentary correctly, was only 5 (or was it 20) pounds. A one pound weapon would probably yield in excess of 1 kilotons or 1,000 tons of TNT.

That would be enough to take out a large portion of the center of most cities around the country. By comparison, the bunker-busters are only 2 ton bombs. The daisy-cutters are 7 ton bombs.

BWDIK?
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