Yikes, that’s scary. Could you cite that, YWalker?
From the site Ranchoth cited:
Thanks. That’s pretty darn sobering.
Well, lets see: Dive deep into the ocean on the almost-certainly doomed effort to fish-up a small quantity of conventional explosives in a nuke-shaped case, at a cost of thousands of dollars (at a minimum) - or - Mix up your you own equally powerful explosives in your garage from commercially-available components in much larger quantities for the same cost and much higher chance of success. Hmmm… If I were a bad guy, which would I choose?
Tranquilis,
if you were a bad guy, surely you would send frogmen from your nearby under water base…
The one upshot of using the discarded 400# bomb would be that the explosives could be traced back to the US.
If someone wanted to try to implicate or link the US in a massive bombing, that is…
I’m just sayin’, is all.
The bomb is perfectly safe, guarded by sharks with fricken’ laser beams on their heads.
and
I find both of these very hard to believe. It sounds a lot like media sensationalism. The nature of how these bombs work make it very unlikely that one would go off after/during crashing to the ground. It takes a very precise and controlled explosion to make one of these devices go “high order”. True, the conventional explosives in the device may detonate, but then you are only talking about pounds of explosives not kilotons of a warhead (megatons for a hydrogen bomb, but that’s another story).
Lots o’ easier ways of doing that… A couple thousand bucks to your friendly local corrupt supply seargeant, and you’re all set! Could get maybe a couple thousand pounds of brand new stuff, very credible!
When you get it, make sure to send a finder’s fee to me, c/o The Hidden Underwater Bad Guy’s Base, Tidewater Region, GA.
Scuba messengers accepted.
Giving this a bump having just run across this article about the accident in question.
Electronics still working well enough to set off a nuke after 45 years of submergance? Someone hasn’t got all their facts together, to say the least.
And well he might be hazy: While conventional weapons can and do sometimes surface, and are dangerous, they are set off by mechanical systems, not the complex and precise electronic package necessary to detonate a nuke. In other words, his ignorance is as great as his enthusiasm. At most, you might have an explosion of the lenses which would scatter the core about. Even that is highly unlikely, though nothing to sneer at.
“He died of rheumatic fever on 21 July 1796, and was buried four days later in St. Michael’s churchyard (Dumfries, Scotland), while his wife was in labour with their ninth child. Burns was reinterred in a domed mausoleum in 1815.” You can see a photo of the mausoleum here.