So here is the scenario. Country A loads and arms a atomic bomb onto a plane intending to drop it onto a neighbouring country B.
Country B gets wind of this and dispatches its aircraft to intercept. Missile hits nuclear weapon bearing plane at 10,000 feet. Plane does not have chance to drop the atomic bomb.
What happens next to the atomic bomb.
Anything from massive detonation (the Hiroshima bomb was felt to be unsafe and a detonation risk, so the actual physics package was not inserted until just before dropping) for 1940’s style gun-type weapon, to the local environment needs a massive clean but no detonation up for modern weapons.
There have been crashes of planes with nuclear weapons before.
This may not apply to every type of bomb out there, but we’ve actually accidentally dropped a few nukes over the years and so far none of them have gone off.
Implosion-type nuclear weapons require an extremely precisely timed detonation of the high-explosive shell surrounding the fissile material so as to assure even compression all around. If part of the high explosive shell detonates earlier/later than the rest, then the fissile material will be squished out of its center toward the area of high explosive that is behind the times. Really, the only way to assure nuclear criticality is to have the bomb’s electronics manage the detonation of the shell - and those electronics are designed to assure that this doesn’t happen until the right preconditions are met (i.e. properly armed/authorized, and at the designated latitude/longitude/altitude/speed/time, and who-knows-what-else).
An anti-aircraft missile striking the bomber will not cause the nuclear weapon’s electronics to detonate it. Assuming the inbound missile scores a hit on the nuke itself, I see two possibilities:
Shrapnel from the inbound missile’s warhead shreds the core and disperses the fissile material in large fragments that are later collected with relative ease (relative to case #2 below).
Shrapnel and/or the blast wave from the inbound missile’s warhead detonates the high-explosive shell surrounding the core, causing fine atomization of the fissile material, resulting in much broader contamination and difficult cleanup.
Bottom line is that you will not have a nuclear detonation; at worst, you will have a dirty/radiological dispersal event.
A modern nuclear bomb that gets blown up by a missile will have a small conventional explosion and leave some nasty poisonous and radioactive debris from the bomb material. If you happen to be right at the spot where the debris hits then you’ll have a bad time, but it’s not any kind of environmental catastrophe. The bomb won’t explode with a nuclear explosion, modern designs use carefully timed explosions occuring in a very precise pattern. If they just get hit with something, the conventional explosives may explode, but that won’t induce a fission reaction. The really early WW2-era bombs were more like a two lumps of metal that just need to smack together to go off, but no one uses that kind of bomb because they’re heavy, less destructive, and use more nuclear materiel than modern designs.
It’s virtually impossible for a nuke to go off accidentally. The most that will happen is some scattering of fissile material.
Corollory question.
Would such an attack and recovery of the atom bomb or its fragments justify a counter nuclear attack by country B.
What would be international opinion on this?
That question would probably work better as its own thread in a different forum, since this one is for factual questions and tries to avoid politics.
Moderating
This requires speculation, and so is not a natter for GQ. If you want to ask this, open a new thread in IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Would a modern nuclear bomb include some kind of self-destruct mechanism to avoid recovery (by hostile force) in case of plane crash/emergency landing in enemy territory?
Sort of. US bombs have significant anti-tamper features. So if the bomb was recovered mostly intact it couldn’t be repurposed as a nuclear IED packed into a shipping container or van.
Bad guys could certainly disassemble it, either smartly with delicacy or stupidly with a band saw, with the intent to harvest the fissile material itself.
I have no clue whether these same types of features are incorporated in other countries designs
Several folks upthread talked about “modern nuclear bopmbs”. It seems pretty obvious the safety and control features of the weapons from the traditional high volume nuclear powers are well-protected from accidental detonation. If not we’d have seen some accidental detonations by now.
I haven’t read anything about the quality of these safeguards on Israeli, Indian, Pakistani, or NK weapons. (Did I forget anyone?) Even if they were working from Chinese-derived plans, themselves partly derivatives of Russian designs, there’s no assurance they’d choose to include the trickiest of the safety features. Maybe they did; maybe they didn’t. Every safety feature has the potential to increase your dud rate. Different weapons organizations will arrive at different tradeoff decisions.
Some novel I read concerned Arabs recovering an Israeli nuclear weapon from a plane crash. The scientist or engineer that took it apart to make a dirty nuke died of radiation poisoning.
Yeah; they’re kinda diabolical that way.
Tom Clancy’s Sum of All Fears.
Yes, thanks!
The USA was able to determine where the bomb came from studying the radiation from the atomic material. Is that on the up and up?
Maybe.
We definitely do have aerial recon planes that fly downwind of tests such as NK has been running. We used to do it for the Soviets & Chinese. They collect radioactive samples for later analysis. There’s a couple paragraphs in the middle of Martin RB-57D Canberra - Wikipedia about that variant.
How much one could learn from the nuclear debris is a different question. And would depend on what we already knew about the materials going into any particular warhead. Which are obviously things none of us know or will write about.
Of course there is still one somewhere off the coast of Georgia from a mid air crash in 1958. I think it is the only one never recovered.
There’s one buried in a swamp in either North or South Carolina, isn’t there? From what I remember, there were two bombs on board a plane that broke up in air. One bomb armed itself to the point of deploying its parachute and was only one failsafe away from going kablooey. The other one didn’t get so close to arming itself and without its parachute deploying, it buried itself deep in the swamp muck. They dug around in the swamp but couldn’t find it. They ended up just turning that section of swamp into a restricted area.
It’s difficult to reconcile the quote in green with the quote in red - they directly contradict each other. The environmental catastrophe is the spread of highly poisonous plutonium or uranium over a large area. A case in point, when the USAF lost a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons over Spain in 1966, and plutonium spread over a square mile of forests and fields, necessitating a cleanup taking decades and the removal of 1400 tons to waste landfills on the other side of the Atlantic. The cleanup was actually fantastically successful - now, over 50 years later, no adverse health effects have been recorded in the area’s inhabitants.
Of course, a worse catastrophe would have resulted if the bomb had exploded and dispersed fallout, but that was not possible because of the safeguards built into the bomb to prevent exactly this sort of accident from resulting in a nuclear explosion.