I like the cabin cruiser. Gives me time to dock it near the target (we’re talking a nuclear weapon here) and catch a flight back to Elbonia.
That is 100 years.
We will be dead.
What the hell is up with that?
I plan to post from the grave.
Gives some time for the fallout to dissipate then it will bin itself.
I’ll be checking, see you around 2120.
Wasn’t there a Cold War book where some terrorist/armed group with a nuke steals a battleship that’s a museum ship and floats it up the Potomac the idea behind it being no matter how well defended Washington DC is no way in hell they can stop a battleship?
Battleships are tough, but they’re not invincible. If it’s a museum piece, then there won’t be any usable defensive ordnance aboard to fend off assault. The propulsion system probably won’t be working either, so they’ll have a tug that is likewise vulnerable to attack.
Finally, detonating a nuke at ground level causes considerably less widespread damage than detonating the same nuke at altitude.
If you wanted to have high confidence of wrecking the Pentagon, Capitol, and White House with a single blast, an airburst is the way to go. The flight path for landing on runway 19 at Reagan airport takes planes right along the Potomac, so you wouldn’t even have to deviate from that path; at the right spot, you’d be about a mile from the Pentagon, a mile from the White House, and about two miles from the Capitol.
If it’s something like a W88 (475 kT), this blast effects calculator estimates you’d wreck all three sites:
Peak overpressure:20 psi
Distance from the explosion site: 1.8 Kilometers
Damage and injuries:Heavily built concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolishedPeak overpressure:10 psi
Distance from the explosion site: 2.8 Kilometers
Damage and injuries:Reinforced concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished. Most people are killed.
As noted upthread, a direct defense against an attack like this would be difficult. The only reliable defense would be to deter with a credible threat of retaliation, i.e. good ol’ mutually assured destruction. A single nuke would make a mess of DC, but most of our military assets are elsewhere and would be ready, willing, and able to deliver an apocalyptic counterpunch.
@Machine_Elf nailed it.
No need to hijack or customize an airplane. No need to deviate from the standard flightpath. Just disguise the bomb and ship it as ordinary cargo on an ordinary flight to DCA on a day the wind is reliably coming from the south. That’ll put the bomb in a decent location at a lower-than ideal height, but still better than a ground burst. Now you just need to trigger it.
The bomb can be triggered by a GPS receiver or simple INS navigator when it detects it’s close enough to the Pentagon. You might also want a remote control so somebody on board can push a button if that fails. You can also have it triggered by somebody on the ground watching the flight’s progress on a website like FlightAware. Heck, you might want the bomb itself to have a Wi-Fi enabled computer that is connected to the airplane’s Wi-Fi and is watching the flight’s progress via FlightAware.
In fact a good plan should have all 4 methods. And if they all fail, your courier just waits for the unexploded bomb to be delivered as the cargo it is, picks it up, trucks it to another city and tries again another day to ship it to DCA, perhaps after improving the triggering methods.
I have often said over the last 20 years that I know for absolute proof positive that no non-state actor like ISIS or Al Qaeda has a nuke. How can I be so sure? because NYC is still un-nuked. If they get it they will use it. They haven’t used it. Therefore they don’t have it. QED.
DCA is not an international airport so that would limit the origin of the flight.
Late edit to my prior post:
Here’s a better calculator: NukeMap .
Over the Potomac and abeam the Pentagon the airplane will be at about 500 feet, which is lower than ideal for widespread damage to hardened buildings.
It certainly won’t decapitate the entire government or the DoD. But it will be the start of the v2.0 of the USA; almost nothing will be unchanged after this goes off.
@CookingWIthGas: Agreed. Slipping the weapon into the country is just one more obstacle. That’s just another part of the shell game that makes it more difficult to attribute the attack to any particular hostile power. That it was on a jet coming from e,g. Chattanooga is just more deception.
You must have a great internet provider.
If it’s in a windowless metal-walled cargo hold as ordinary cargo, it’s not going to be able to receive a GPS signal. If I want to use my cell phone on a flight to find out where we are, I have to hold it right up to the passenger window.
Isn’t aircraft Wi-Fi typically disabled during the approach phase of the flight? Also, how frequently is the FlightAware data updated? If there’s a latency of a minute or two, the bomb/plane could be several miles from where you expect it to be.
How good is inertial navigation near the end of an hours-long international flight? If we’re trying to get the bomb to a location that can flatten all three of the sites I mentioned, we’d need to position the bomb probably within a 1-mile circle. Can inertial navigation do that at the end of a flight of several thousand miles?
All good concerns.
GPS in a cargo hold is flaky with the antenna built into a phone. Would a larger purpose built GPS antenna, e.g. one from a car, work better enough to matter?
At least on my jet, Wi-Fi has internet connectivity full time regardless of altitude. We connect to a separate cockpit-specific SSID and there may well be a firewall rule that gets switched on and off for the passenger SSID based on altitude. I’ve never experimented with that. If so, that could be defeated by getting a crewmember’s device and hacking out the relevant network keys, passwords, whatever. Across thousands of workers, devices get lost or stolen pretty regularly, and AFAIK don’t result in widespread re-provisioning of all the mumbo jumbo keys for what’s inherently not a highly secure highly criticality resource.
If we’re landing in DCA, we’re not coming internationally thousands of miles. We’re coming from somewhere in CONUS. The old perimeter rule is pretty porous these days, but if we’re worried about INS drift we pick a flight originating nearby in both time and distance. Hence my choice of Chattanooga. The INS-only side of the nav system I use typically has a drift rate of under 100 feet per hour after 6 hours in the air. After just a couple of hours that would not be a big issue. The drift rate won’t have built up very much, nor would it have had enough time to drift very far in the time available.
Another triggering mechanism should be barometric. Because the flight paths are tightly constrained vertically having a trigger that goes off at 500 feet barometric cabin pressure after previously having been up above, say, two thousand feet will still be in the ballpark.
With enough belts and suspenders, and especially with the ability to try more than once if all your triggers fail, this can be made to work. It’ll still be a nail-biting thing to watch for those in the know as the plot unfolds. Lots of ways to have it fall apart or fail or fizzle. Overall though, if I was the head bad guy I’d be a lot more worried about the plot being foiled days, weeks, or months before the airplane takes off than I would be about it failing after the airplane takes off.
A nuke needs to be detonated at elevation to be effective. If you use a boat, most of the blast will be deflected into the air by the riverbank.
A large enough nuke will make a big enough hole. Besides, a ground burst kicks a lot more radioactive material into the air, giving you better long-term effects. And a neat hole in the ground.
Remote sensing is a thing. I wonder whether LEO satellite-based sensors can get enough of a signal from, just guessing here, an exotic daughter product of Tritium, Plutonium, or U-235? I.e., not just gamma rays at X MeV. If not, I do know there are highway sensors for those signals, and likely sensors on publicly accessible waterways and public safety vehicles that patrol them.
Air freighter would be my guess over passenger jet. Declare in-flight emergency, descend to a good air burst height (10-15,000 for MT yield plus, and why go small?), and instant World’s Largest Public Health Disaster.
I do know that if you see a helicopter like this flying around, it might be concerning. Or they’re just updating their map of baseline radiation sources for the area.
The question then becomes “Can you shield your nuke effectively?” Makes it harder and heavier to load, but on a boat that shouldn’t be an issue. On a plane gets you the air burst, but also gets you scrutinized by more suspicious people than normal.
The “best” option, I’ve always thought, was the one postulated in “The Hamlet Ultimatum” by Leonard Sanders. In this novel, the Bad Guys don’t bother trying to build a bomb. They just load all sorts of radioactive material into modified fireworks and plan to set them off all over the Northeast US at once, resulting in the whole area becoming uninhabitable for the next 1000 years or so due to radioactive ash settling everywhere. As one of their people put it “Plutonium burns just like magnesium does, but doesn’t lose any of its radioactivity in the process.” Don’t know if that’s true or not, but the idea seemed sound. And crazy.
Plutonium is pyrophoric, per this OSTI publication, and news reports of glovebox fires at places like Rocky Flats. How pyrophoric, and how bioavailable such plutonium oxide and nitride compounds are, I don’t know. I’d think you’d get greater bang for your buck using it in a core, but it may be sufficiently contaminated with pre-detonating isotopes, that it would be unsuitable for that. I doubt sufficient concentrations of material could be realized to contaminate the wide area the authors of that book were trying to convey. Consider that, as bad and as long lived as the Chernobyl fire was, the ultimate area of contamination was much smaller than all over the Northeast US. It would scare tons of people though, which is the real point of a radiological contamination device.
Shielding certainly works to attenuate radiation. We all know about doubling thicknesses. Which is why I was wondering about something weird, like some variety of muon, that may not interact very strongly with matter, yet could have a signature a detector could discern as ‘bomb’, and not ‘trailer full of granite countertops’ or ‘contaminated Mexican scrap metal.’
The Air Force spent a bunch of money on the strategic bomber fleet, later examples of which had the job of finding and killing mobile ICBMs. How were they supposed to ‘see’ them from 50,000 feet? Scud-hunting was already shown to be tough, even with long duration ISR aerial and satellite assets. Might there have been some sort of other radiological detector too? (Though good luck getting a signal in an area filled with fallout.)
Edit: what are the security measures at a Third World air freighter hub, compared to a passenger jet hub? Might it be easier for our hypothetical non-state actor kamikazes to smuggle the device from their factory to the hub country, infiltrate the hub, take over something like a 777, and fly it into CONUS? I’m sure it’s been gamed thoroughly, and countermeasures devised. Seems easier than doing it at a passenger terminal.
Gamma spectroscopy is one way to identify various isotopes, also neutrons. I am not aware there is anything like a portable neutrino detector.
The concept of ‘dirty bombs’ has been around a long time. There are two flaws with this plan:
The amount of plutonium required to make the northeast US uninhabitable is enormous.
Plutonium is very costly to come by.