<A 20KT weapon is around 5.5 x 10^13 joules. If 10% of it decays over 20 years, that's would be about 8KW. Hey, you'd notice it if it was under your bed, but it's not outside the scope of engineering to design a reasonably small toy that dissipates 8KW.>
Interesting. I've never thought about this stuff. So there is a natural upper limit to a suitcase bomb! It would need to be above critical mass so that gives a lower limit, minimum size, weight etc. But 20 megaton monster ones would require a great deal of cooling, if they were to be stored in a ready to go form on top of an ICBM or in a B52.
Hence, I suppose, the need for hydrogen bombs.
Using your calculation, a 20 megaton fission bomb would need 8000 kilowatts. That's a serious amount of heat! The Ryder truck would get meltdown. The FBI could spot them a mile away with an infrared detector. From a satellite, they'd show up as a glowing red spot moving down the freeway. They'd have to be disguised as power stations, smelters or some such. Hard to hide.
20 kilotons isn't a very big bang. Tunguska type meteors which are coming in pretty regularly are a lot more scary. One such splashing down over the Pacific Ocean would make a tsunami big enough to end all of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco etc in one go. Not to mention the whole Pacific Rim [Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Auckland].
I'd say lifetime risk for Americans is greater from meteors and chicken flu than from AlQ.
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