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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Bilow who wrote (124855)2/20/2004 2:53:19 AM
From: Maurice Winn  Read Replies (1) of 281500
 
Carl, thanks for the detail. Thinking about deteriorating nukes due to natural fission processes, it's obvious that the rate of deterioration is in the order of at least lots of decades or the things would melt.

One megaton of Uranium fission [let's forget about fusion for now] is a LOT of energy. To get the energy released from a 1 metre diameter bomb equivalent to say 1000 kilotons or even say 10,000 kilotons for a 1% degradation, that's a heck of a lot of energy.

10 million kilograms of oil [near enough to some TNT in energy content] would provide sufficient energy to keep a 1 metre bomb red hot for decades.

So I think you must be right that deterioration is very slow.

Okay, I've convinced myself that noocular bombs will last for a decade at least, which is long enough for the purposes of AlQ to smuggle them into the USA.

Mqurice
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