Suitcase Nuclear Bomb - On September 7, 1997, 60 Minutes aired a shocking news story and allegations from the Russian National Security Advisor, General Alexander Lebed. Lebed said the former Soviet Union had not only produced but lost track of perhaps 100 of its most terrifying weapons: a nuclear bomb in a mine that looked like a small suitcase, designed to be detonated by one person with only half the power. hour's notice. Lebed claimed that the weapons had a yield of 1 kiloton (equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT), measured 60 x 40 x 20 centimeters (24 x 16 x 8 inches) and, before the fall of the USSR in 1991, were distributed to members of the USSR. the GRU (Foreign Military Intelligence Unit). The thought that such a device could exist and there is no data on its models is a disturbing thought to say the least! That claim, which was strongly denied by Russian authorities at the time, sparked fears that the bombs may have fallen into the hands of terrorists. Republican Congressman Curt Weldon has led a public inquiry into the perceived risks of these bombs, and has been known to use one joke to express his opinion.
Examples of "nuke in a suitcase" abound in popular fiction, but is it possible to produce a small nuclear weapon? If so, is it possible that such weapons exist and do not exist at all?
Suitcase Nuclear Bomb
To get to the bottom of this, it is necessary to consider what makes a nuclear weapon work.
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Nuclear weapons work by combining the right amount, the right weapon, under the right conditions, at the right speed. Fortunately for humanity, since this is the most destructive new weapon, meeting these needs is easier said than done, and the necessary equipment is very hard to come by. The required material must be 'fissile', meaning it must be capable of a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. Examples of such elements are certain isotopes of uranium and plutonium. In short, fission is the process by which atoms split, releasing energy, atoms of other elements, and particles called neutrons. Since neutrons have no charge, they do not want to repel each other as they go to the atom (in the same way two magnets that are charged equally will repel each other). They can hit the nucleus of an atom that splits and splits apart, giving off, again, energy and more neutrons. This process repeats itself a large number of times within an atomic explosion, all in a very short period of time. If the mass of the fissile material reaches a point where the same number of neutrons are present than in the previous 'generation', then the mass can be said to be "significant". Any state where more neutrons are present than during the previous generation of fission can be said to be "critical" and that is what is needed for a nuclear explosion.
This critical mass must decrease rapidly, or it will explode before enough atoms are separated and before any significant release of energy can occur. Another method is to burn one piece of material to another. The first and failed prototype of a nuclear weapon aimed to achieve this method using plutonium. However, it was soon realized that this method would only be successful if highly enriched uranium was used...and a lot of it. Therefore, this is called "gun assembly", although it is simple, it is difficult. It was this type of weapon that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Smaller but still larger cannons have been tested in the past for use in the United States' large munitions, certainly larger than suitcases. As for the suitcase bomb, the images that abound on the web showing a gun mounted in a suitcase do not accurately depict how large such a device would need to be to be effective. Another method, which uses plutonium, uranium, or a combination of the two, is to compress the mass of the explosive material using explosives. In this case, the explosive charges are made to focus their energy inward, in the same way a glass lens focuses a beam of light. For this reason, the charges are known as explosive lenses. This "assembly implosion" will not increase the mass of the existing fragments, but will greatly increase its density, allowing it to become supercritical. To help with this, at the center of the mass is a device known as a launcher. Converging shock waves crush the initiator, bringing masses of polonium into contact with beryllium. The alpha particles emitted by the polonium release a flood of neutrons from the beryllium, helping to stop the chain reaction. This is how the first nuclear weapon ever tested worked, and the weapon that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Early examples of both types of bombs were numerous, although the second type required less fissile material and with technological advances over the decades, examples became much smaller. The first impact bombs required a large method of using a high voltage discharge to detonate 32 or more lenses at once. The electronics needed to do this, for example, are much smaller in 2011, or even before 1997 when Lebed's claims were made, than in 1945! However, it takes a large amount of explosives to install the "core" of the bomb.
In this article from Nuclear Weapons Archives, Carey Sublette explains how small such weapons are. He suggested that, although it would add to the size of the device, the smaller beryllium reflector would reduce the weight of the material needed to produce the explosion, and thus the overall weight. The reflector rotates around the bomb and serves to bounce neutrons back into its core. Sublette suggests that a mass of about 10.1 kilograms could cause a nuclear explosion without a large detonator. The output from such a bomb would be small; about several tens of tons of conventional explosives. This is far from the kind of energy that could be released from the same mass of fissile material if there were no size limits—the weapon used against Nagasaki used about 6.2 kilograms of plutonium to produce the equivalent of 22,000 tons of TNT. Such a low yield does not mean that the dangers of this device will be small, as its release called "initial" or "quick" radiation will cause great danger.
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As it happens, the theoretical weapon that Subltette describes has a physical size very similar to that of the weapons tested by the United States. This 'V-54' warhead, in the form of an M388 missile, forms the heart of an unusual weapon system known as the Davy Crocket, which was a non-reversible nuclear weapon. just for the enemy but for any allies that may be nearby! These weapons were distributed by American soldiers on the ground in Europe during the Cold War, luckily it did not explode. The warhead itself was a 10.7 x 15.7 inch (27.3 x 40 cm) cylinder.
The V-54 weapon was also developed into another type of weapon; special weapons of mass destruction or SADM. These man-made weapons were to be used to destroy structures such as bridges. It was also cylindrical in shape and approximately 15.7 x 23.6 inches (40 cm x 60 cm), weighing 68 kilograms; it must be stored in a sufficiently large suitcase. Details from the former Soviet Union about the type and designation of nuclear weapons are not readily available in the public domain, although it has been suggested that there may be a similar Soviet-made weapon called the RA-155. It is even more difficult to establish the claim of the Soviet defector Colonel Stanislav Lunyev, formally of the GRU, who called the missing charge "nuke in a suitcase" a small nuclear bomb of destruction called RA-115.
Implosion devices have a subtype - those in which the fissile mass is not crushed many times its normal density because it is surrounded by large explosive lenses, but instead it is reshaped and compressed as it is inserted into the cylindrical mass of explosives detonated at the end . The fissile device used is a plutonium-gallium alloy that is stable at normal pressure, but requires only a moderate change in pressure to cause a change in its "phase". The size of the fragments present exceeds the critical mass when a spherical configuration is achieved and the hollow spaces between the cores are collapsed. This method of crowding is known as "linear two-point implosion". To use
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