OK, lets say that you are trying to set off a nuclear warhead. An advanced EM Pulse goes off and all the electricity has stopped working, including the electric controls on the Nuke, that means that the conventional explosive trigger is completely kaput and inoperational.
OK, starting with that dillema, is there any way to set off the nuke manually by any other means that have not been fried?
I.E. dropping it really hard, throwing a rock at it, setting it on fire, etc.
You are given all the time you need, and any metal tool that you might need (as long as it does not need electricity to operate).
Any ideas among the teeming masses?
DONT WORRY, I DO NOT, I REPEAT, I DO NOT CURRENTLY POSSESS A NUCLEAR WARHEAD, AND I AM IN NO WAY PLANNING OR CONSPIRING TO ACQUIRE OR DETONATE SUCH A DEVICE IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE. I AM NOT NOW NOR HAVE I EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF AN ORGANIZATION CONSPIRING TO COMMIT TERRORISTIC ACTIVITIES ON AMERICAN SOIL.
Sorry, you’re S.O.L. The only way to initiate a nuclear explosion is to detonate the conventional explosives around the fission core with multiple pulses, coordinated to each other with microsecond precision. If you just stick a blasting cap into the Hi-X and hit it with a hammer, all you’ll do is blow the fission core into fragments.
At least if we’re talking about a modern high-yield implosion device. You’d have better luck with an “assembly” type fission bomb like the original Hiroshima bomb, but I don’t think anyone stockpiles those anymore. They’re dinosaurs by today’s standards.
Plus, nukes are more or less designed to resist such monkeying around. They were made to endure plane crashes and being hit with bombs without being detonated, though they may be destroyed and spread radioactive material around. (In other words, you’ll have a dirty bomb.)
In fact, I think you could pretty well whale on them with a hammer without worrying about releasing the radioisotopes, but I could be wrong.
I think you would be out of luck; it is very hard to set off a nuke without using the precise electronics. That being said, I would think that nukes would have some EMP sheilding build-in; it wouldn’t be that hard to enclose the electronics in a faraday cage.
If you don’t have a spare bomb lying around whose trigger you can use, I don’t think you could get a nuclear detonation without complete reengineering of the bombs core.
I agree with DreadCthulhu though, almost all modern military electronics are EMP protected.
Well, as I remember, an A-4 rolled off of a carrier deck a few decades back, with a nuke onboard.
The plane sank immediately…and there was a little concern that the water pressure at great ocean depths might set the bomb off. But no explosion was detected.
Also, keep in mind that there have been other nukes lost at sea, in submarines, and didn’t detonate. So it’s probably impossible with “normal” water pressure on the seabed.
If it’s a an thermonuclear weapon, a fusion bomb, however, you might be able to send the onboard Hydrogen and Deuterium into a fusion reaction.
IMO, all the other posters are right that if the bomb’s electronics are inoperative, you won’t be able to detonate it. Also, as Derleth says, bombs have interlocks and countermeasures designed to prevent unauthorized users from setting off the device.
However, I believe that the premise of the OP is incorrect: it seems highly unlikely that an EMP would in fact disable the bomb. After all, these devices are expected to be stored, deployed, and used in circumstances in which other bombs are going off left and right. It wouldn’t be very practical to send a bomber out with a dozen bombs if the first one it dropped would disable the rest of the payload.
So I think we can pretty safely assume that the eletronics packages for nuclear weapons are hardened against EMP.
There is a specific sequence of events that must take place to ensure critical mass occurs in order to employ atomic fission. With your human responses, you won’t be able to do the split second-timing response to achieve critical mass.
Tripler
At the most, you’d die of radiation poisioning just dealing with the fissile mass.
BTW, all the posts saying that detonating a bomb would be impossible if its electronics had been disabled were assuming you had an implosion device, or in the case of a thermonuclear device–an H bomb–a primary that uses an implosion device.
But if you happened to have a gun-type device, like, for instance, the original Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb, or a W33 artillery-shell weapon, you could probably fire it without much trouble. The gun-type weapon is very simple conceptually and only requires setting off the explosive charge that drives one subcritical mass into the other. Should only require closing a switch, theoretically. (Although you’d want a really long fuse.)
However, the vast majority of modern nuclear weapons are implosion devices, in which a hollow, sub-critical sphere of fissile material (U-235 or PU-239) is precisely compressed into a critical sphere by a surrounding mass of shaped high-explosive charges. These require the precise timing mentioned above.
No direct experience here (just reading some Richard Rhodes), but, in 1945 they didn’t have sophisticated electronics and they managed to rig something up that imploded. I think that if the rest of the bomb is intact, you should be able to at least drive a partial reaction.
Given that most modern bombs are thermonuclear and only depend on the X-ray pulse to provide the “spark” for the lithium deuteride, I think even a “fizzle” should be able to give quite the boom. IIRC there has never been a true “fizzile” that produced anything less than a few kilotons – all atomic testing, even relatively primative attempts, have succeeeded. I would bet that the fission core of these modern bombs is pretty small (they tend to be the dirty aspects of the weapon), and get the majority of their oomph from the fusion bit. The fusion bit then sets off more fission. So even if you got partial fission enough to light the fusion, you should be able to at least blow the roof off the dump.
I agree that there is no way to set off a bomb manually, like Vyvyan on the Young Ones did with a hammer (remember to paint yourself white like Neil to shield yourself from the blast!) But a bit of electronic know-how (even with primitive EMP invulnerable parts) should give you at least 10 kilotons.
I think the thing most are missing is that we’re talking about today’s bombs that nations have. As stated earlier, the H-bombs didn’t need the technology we have in today’s TNW’s. If a terrorist wants to build an H-bomb, I’m sure the recipe is out there for purchase (how the hell do you think India and Pakistan got it?)
An aside, I love the irony of getting booted for asking how to get around file-sharing laws since it’s illegal, but we can discuss how to get around trivial things like setting off atomic bombs.
But seriously, how friggin’ cool would it be to find an H-bomb and set it up in the den?
Another nuke might cause some fission, but it wouldn’t be very efficient. Trying to visualize this, you’d probably blow most of the fissile material into the atmosphere but I think a small percentage would undergo fission simply by chance. It certainly wouldn’t be a chain reaction, which is what most people want.
OTOH, maybe you wouldn’t even get that much. As I recall, the Hiroshima bomb had an absurdly low efficiency rate and that was pretty well designed (given what we knew at the time). Your setup wouldn’t even be that well designed.
Surely most US weapons today have some form of PAL and enviromental sensors. So you would have to replicate the forces and situations the weapon would experience when deployed. see
