US Senator Lindsey Graham insisted in a TV interview that Israel should drop nuclear bombs on Gaza, where more than 2 million Palestinian civilians, includin...
Wait, if that’s the case why does it take massive teams of scientists to develop a nuke? I could duck tape some plutonium to a brick of C4 if I didn’t care about getting cancer.
Everything has to be very precisely shaped. You need extremely sophisticated fuses that can go off within miliseconds of each other to ensure the plutonium comes together to reach super-criticality or whatever it’s called when the nuclear chain reaction becomes self sustaining. If the time is off even by a tiny amount you get a normal explosion and a liquid jet of super-hot plutonium instead of a nuclear explosion.
That said, the actual nuclear detonation isn’t that complicated, it’s like high school or early college level physics. Once people figured it all out, once we knew it was possible, the core concepts aren’t that hard. These days building a nuke is an engineering challenge, metallurgy and machining. The physics is well understood.
:muppets-bunson: “In the saline solution inside this syringe floats the smallest nuclear bomb known to science! …At least I hope it is, as it is invisible to the naked eye.”
Would it be possible to make a nuke small enough to kill just one person
Polonium?
Doesn’t really explode tho
Polonium and a grenade
Poor man’s ultra-mini DIY nuke.
I know it’s a very difficult DIY project. But once you’ve got the polonium - you’ve got a stew going.
That’s as much a matter of isolating the person as shrinking the yield
Comically tiny nuke.
World’s Smallest Nuclear Bomb from MDK
I’m willing to support the senator being used as a test subject to determine if it’s possible
Well, a nuke is a sphere of c4 wrappy around a couple of pieces of plutonium, so if we’re not to hung up on the nuclear explosion part then yes.
Wait, if that’s the case why does it take massive teams of scientists to develop a nuke? I could duck tape some plutonium to a brick of C4 if I didn’t care about getting cancer.
Everything has to be very precisely shaped. You need extremely sophisticated fuses that can go off within miliseconds of each other to ensure the plutonium comes together to reach super-criticality or whatever it’s called when the nuclear chain reaction becomes self sustaining. If the time is off even by a tiny amount you get a normal explosion and a liquid jet of super-hot plutonium instead of a nuclear explosion.
That said, the actual nuclear detonation isn’t that complicated, it’s like high school or early college level physics. Once people figured it all out, once we knew it was possible, the core concepts aren’t that hard. These days building a nuke is an engineering challenge, metallurgy and machining. The physics is well understood.
Ohhh look at the nerd here with their nerd facts!
the whole time the mythbusters were just a few kilos of fissionable material away from being the worlds smallest nuclear armed state
:muppets-bunson: “In the saline solution inside this syringe floats the smallest nuclear bomb known to science! …At least I hope it is, as it is invisible to the naked eye.”
Give Lindsey Graham a demon core
Hit him with the Demon Flail
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Fastest fingers in the west
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Any existing nuclear weapon would work for that, just drop it on him without detonating it.
Then it’d be functioning as a bullet, not a nuke
More of an anvil, really.