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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (46773)	10/28/2010 10:54:43 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 71588

'cause all five 'nuclear incidents' did NOT involve nuclear 'weapons'. And I was replying to one that did. Which was clear from the rest of my statement where I quote from your post about the specific incident. 2) regarding 'nuclear weapons' though. (Also pretty sure that the earliest generations' designs did not incorporate as advanced fail sake protections as we routinely design in now. <g>) More advanced and extensive fail safes make things safer, but its not primarily a matter of fail safes. The Mark 4 nuclear bomb was an implosion type weapon (as was "Fat Man"). In terms of avoiding nuclear explosions from impact its already failsafe. The core has to be perfectly shaped, as do the explosives around the core (and different types of explosives need to be shaped and placed differently and timed to go off at slightly different times), and they have to be precisely and rapidly triggered at the perfect time. The nuclear material is a subcritical mass that only becomes critical when its condensed by the large and perfectly shaped and times explosions. If any thing goes even wrong you just get a dirty bomb. (With a gun type weapon like Little Boy with two sub-critical masses that are slammed together, an nuclear explosion from a collision is much more likely, and other safety issues would be more likely even if a nuclear explosion didn't happen.) In addition with the Mark 4 nuclear weapons you had in flight pit insertion, so even the very small chance of a nuclear explosion you would have with the older Fat Man design, would go away (if it was actually carryign the nuclear pit, which apparently it was not in this case). A "dirty bomb" is pretty much all you can get. Also 'nuclear incidents' (even involving bombs that might get ruptured and contents scattered around... like, say, as a result of a crashing and exploding and burning strategic bomber And also the scattered by the conventional explosives in the bomb. might very well be of the 'dirty bomb' variety Which is why I said "They could become "dirty bombs" if they crash (since they have both conventional explosives, and radioactive material)" right at the beginning of my post. But dirty bombs are somewhat overated in popular imagination. They contaminate more than they kill, unless the initial conventional explosion is large enough to kill a lot itself. The contamination is still serious, but not something that's going to kill huge numbers of people, at least not in any but the most sophisticated (and large) designs deliberately using the most dangerous types of radioactive isotopes. A normal fission warhead would be a serious concern as a dirty bomb, but would not cause six figure death tolls, and might not kill anyone outside the blast radius of the conventional explosion.