Anyone heard about this? [video=youtube;kR2IarjjmxE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR2IarjjmxE[/video]
"Jack Bauer may lose 24 hours of sleep worrying about suitcase nukes, but should his viewers? Probably not, nuclear weapons experts say. Nuclear bombs cleverly concealed in suitcases don't exist in real life. Even so, they have long been a popular Hollywood plot point. The lethal luggage — or what non-proliferation experts prefer to call portable nuclear devices — have been featured in action thrillers, including 1997's The Peacemaker with George Clooney and Nicole Kidman and 2002's Bad Company with Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. Now, 24 (Fox, Monday, 9 p.m. ET/PT) has had Kiefer Sutherland and the gang hunting for three bombs packed into suitcases. But how concerned should we really be that suitcase nukes will one day be fact rather than fiction? 'Approaching fantasy' Arms control expert Charles Thornton of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland calls the scenario "so highly unlikely as to be approaching fantasy." Nikolai Sokov of the Center for Non-proliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., says there is no evidence any scientist has been able to create a suitcase-contained nuclear device. In science fiction, "the more disastrous the event, the less likely," he says. "God forbid it happens. But no, it's not very likely." Still, this threat is not just the imagination of an overcaffeinated screenwriter. Modern-day worries about suitcase nukes crested in the late 1990s, when the late Russian general Alexander Lebed suggested that a few dozen portable nuclear devices had disappeared from Russian military stockpiles at the beginning of the decade. Loose Russian nukes have been a major preoccupation of weapons experts since the end of the Cold War. Concerns were underlined by the interception last year of an illegal shipment of weapons-quality uranium, 4 ounces in all (quite a bit less than the amount needed for a bomb), announced in January by Ivane Merabishvili, an official with the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. In particular, worry centered on nuclear artillery shells built by the Soviet Union before its demise. The United States built its own lightweight devices, the parachute-borne Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), which were phased out in 1989. Such devices had similar characteristics to the theoretical suitcase nukes, Sokov notes, including: •Small size, perhaps measuring 23 inches long by 8 inches tall and weighing less than 70 pounds. •Explosive yields from plutonium explosions under 1 kiloton, less than one-tenth as strong as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. •Short battery life for the devices, requiring recharging perhaps every six months. Battery life is one glaring sticking point, Thornton and others say. Any device lost in the early '90s would be battery dead by now, as well as missing a few dozen maintenance checks. (24 plot spoiler alert: The story revolves around the villain seeking to somehow revive the batteries in his suitcase nukes.) A 1-kiloton blast set off from a low-flying airplane would send out lethal radiation in a half-mile radius, leveling most of the buildings in a crowded city, the Federation of American Scientists says. Though it's scary, such a scenario is far from our biggest nuclear terrorism worry, says nuclear physicist Peter Zimmerman of King's College London. In November, Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis of Harvard wrote in the journal Foreign Policy about the steps a domestic terrorist team would have to take to produce a full-fledged atomic bomb" http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-03-12-suitcase-nuclear-bombs_N.htm There has never been such a thing as a suitcase Nuke....just sayin'
'Smaller, but still bulky gun assembly warheads were in the past tested for use in large US artillery shells, certainly much larger that a suitcase.' Doesn't look all that much larger than a suitcase to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:W48_155-millimeter_nuclear_shell.jpg Particularly since you could eliminate the radiation shielding and simplify the trigger device with a 'martyr' delivery system.
Yes, there are. Check your source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_nuke A russian defector described them in great detail. We have developed nuclear weapons small enough to fit into a suitcase and so has Israel. So why is it so far fetched that Russia has not? They developed a much larger nuclear weapon than we ever did in the nuclear arms race of the 60s.
The problem herein is that radioactive material that could fit inside a suitcase could be set off with common explosives to create a dirty bomb. The blast effects are not the killer---it is the radioactive material. Prime targets in the US: Washington DC, NYC---from there, other large cities without large Muslim populations. Some important military bases and then the various large ports: Charelston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, etc.
Sure there is. You have to have enough fissile materials to achieve criticality and set off a fission reaction. As far as I am aware, the smallest ever actually built and tested was the Mk54 for the Davy Crockett Recoilless Rifle. It had a yield of 10-20 tons. [video=youtube;eiM-RzPHyGs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiM-RzPHyGs[/video] The next smallest is the SADM. 100 tons to 1 kiloton, this was designed for demolition, not combat (although the warhead was also used in missiles). At 100 pounds, it was not "suitcase", as much as "backpack". But "suitcase" nukes are simply part of spy novels, having no purpose in the real world.
Then it is not an atomic or nuclear bomb, simply another form of chemical weapon. Just because something is radioactive, that does not mean it is a nuclear bomb. Part of the reason that Hitler refused to allow research into these weapons is that he could not understand that fission was unlike any explosive force at the time. So when they described the effects of the radiation, he thought it was another kind of chemical weapon (which he had already forbidden).
terrorists would love to get a nuke, but they usually go for the cheaper stuff like the crockpot bomb
I assume you mean the pressure cooker bomb, not crock pot. And they do not even go all-out with those. It would not be hard to turn one of those into a crude chemical weapon, or even boosting it with a few propane canisters, but thankfully they do not. Remember, we really are not talking about the smartest cards in the deck for the most part.
yeah, that is what I meant, if you look at the things they have done, they are all on the cheap, hijacking planes (cost them nothing) cost us a ton in both $$$ and lives and were still paying in both I think our over-reaction with two ten year wars only encourages them to attack more in future as for them it cost little, for us it costs a lot to react\respond\protect against future attacks .
Nothing new here, this has been the pattern for over 50 years now. They attack an airport, we attack a training camp. They attack an airliner, we strike some of their agents in the field. They attack a Navy ship, we blow up some more camps. Nothing can be done to discourage them, other then to kill them when possible. Abu Nidal, Carlos, Abu Abbas, Thomas McMahon, Patrick Magee, the list simply goes on and on and on.
The minimum amount of HEU needed to achieve criticality is about 35 lbs. Given a density of 191 g/cc, this equates to 969 cubic inches or 0.56 cubic feet. Well within the capacity of a suitcase. So no, there is no theoretical obstacle to building a suitcase bomb. You're also wrong about the Davy Crockett. It was the smallest in terms of yield, but in terms of physical size, the W48 'nuclear howitzer' shell was the smallest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48 But both of these had to be built much more robustly to survive being fired out of a gun. If your delivery system consists of being wheeled to the target by a martyr, you can dispense with all that.
