Shays claims "Home Depot" nuke possible. Really?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Sam Stone

And implosion bomb is much harder. You can’t just use Amphenol or some other home-made explosive - it has to be extremely high-speed, even burning stuff. The exact knowledge of what kind of explosive you need is classified. Likewise, you need special high speed detonators, and they have to be arranged properly with an electronic timing circuit setting them off. That information is also classified.

Neither the parameters of the explosives, nor the detonation system required for building an imposion devise are, strictly speaking, classified. Explosive lens design for shaped explosive charges is well in the public domain. The actual explosives appropriate for such an application (such as hexanitrostilbene), aren’t readily available for purchase like dynamite or commerical demolition high explosives, but someone with chemical engineering training and an explosives manufacturing background (or access to former Eastern Bloc nations which are less than scrupulous about exporting explosives) could procure or manufacture it. And it’s not as if you need the latest and greatest in high speed explosives; original designs used fairly primative high explosives like PETN, RDX, and HMX based compounds, all of which can be easily manufactured to acceptible purity from commerically available chemicals. (The big push in going to more advanced explosives seems to be more in regard to shape integrity and aging resistance, which requires less delicate handling and less maintanence.)

Kryton switches used in coordinating the detonation signal to all of the explosive lenses, while export restricted in the US, are found in any number of commercial appliances including sychronized flash lighting, high voltage back-projection CRT displays, and photocopiers. Someone experienced and savvy could probably find a way to apply commerically available components. The actual detonators–originally exploding bridgewire detonators, are also used in some limited commerical applications and should be fairly easy to manufacture with some basic knowledge.

Machining the explosive lenses and the pit is a task requiring skill and specialized equipment, but again, in the realm of commerical industry, about the same as making eyeglass lenses. Cincinnati Milacron will sell you a basic 5-axis CNC milling machine that’ll do this job for about $60k. You’re obviously not going to pick one of these up at Home Depot, but it’s conceptually feasible that a private individual could perform this task.

The bigger trick, especiallly for a terrorist organization, is finding skilled designers and technicians. This is obviously not something you are going to learn out of a textbook. While the basic information on how it works is all out there, the critical specifics that seperate a functional device from a fizzle are typically learned by trial and error and are not widely disseminated for obvious reasons. Building even a simple nuclear device isn’t something even large nations undertake lightly; the notion that a small, underground group can put a nuclear or thermonuclear device together out of commonly available materials is nothing but a flight of fancy. (Tom Clancy gets a pass by making the material and skill pool uniquely and coincidentially available to his villians; it wasn’t as if they built the device from raw materials. I refuse to excuse is literary failings, however.)

Home Depot nuke? Not a chance. Just some blowhard ignoramus trying to scare the rubes into voting for him, which is often, sadly, a successful strategy.

Stranger

[constanze]

So, people extremly skilled and knowledgeable, (or determined and creative enough, like the boy-scout mentioned earlier), might be able to get radioactive material from various sources, and might build a dirty bomb. Highly unlikely, but not completly impossible. (After all, people sometimes win the lottery, too.)

What is his suggestion or solution? Home Depot stops selling smoke detectors because of the radioactive element in there? And camping lanterns because of the radioactive wick? And dynamite (useful for tree stump removal), because you can still build a normal bomb? Will the NSA/FBI/? comb all flea markets for old-style sources of radioactive material?

And then people with enough knowledge and skills can build normal bombs from cleaning materials in the drugstore and supermarket. Terrorists can also do a lot of damage with conventional bombs. Or chemical weapons (see the Aum Shurikyo bomb on the Tokyo subway).

[Tuckerfan]

@Stranger On A Train

Kryton switches used in coordinating the detonation signal to all of the explosive lenses, while export restricted in the US, are found in any number of commercial appliances including sychronized flash lighting, high voltage back-projection CRT displays, and photocopiers. Someone experienced and savvy could probably find a way to apply commerically available components. The actual detonators–originally exploding bridgewire detonators, are also used in some limited commerical applications and should be fairly easy to manufacture with some basic knowledge

According to the film Trinity and Beyond the original bombs used photographic timers, since they were the most accurate available at the time. Considering that it’s possible to buy damned near every electronic gizmo with the capability of synching to an atomic clock (either via a Bureu of Standards radio signal or WiFi connection), I’d think that getting fancy switches wouldn’t be all that necessary.

Tapioca Dextrin, you’re thinking of The Anarchist’s Cookbook as far as the inaccurate info goes.

[mks57]

@Tuckerfan

According to the film Trinity and Beyond the original bombs used photographic timers, since they were the most accurate available at the time. Considering that it’s possible to buy damned near every electronic gizmo with the capability of synching to an atomic clock (either via a Bureu of Standards radio signal or WiFi connection), I’d think that getting fancy switches wouldn’t be all that necessary.

According to what I’ve read, triggered spark-gap switches and exploding-bridge-wire detonators were used because of the need for a system that could reliably initiate the high-explosive lens assembly at multiple points, synchronized to the nanosecond level. Electric blasting caps were far too variable in their timing to be used for this application. This led to the development of the exploding-bridge-wire detonator, which works like a electrical fuse that has been grossly overloaded. This produced a requirement for an initiation system that could deliver a synchronized set of high-power electrical pulses, with very fast rise-times, to the detonators.

[DrDeth]

@Sam Stone

I assume he meant that assuming terrorists got their hands on some fissile material, they could build the rest of the bomb from parts purchased at Home Depot.

For a very crude, low-yield gun type bomb, that might be possible. .

Yeah, that’s what I thought too, and I agree. I’d be hard, and whoever built it would likely kill themselves through radiation poisoning, but it could be done. The hard part would be getting the fissionable material. :dubious:

[Tuckerfan]

@DrDeth

Yeah, that’s what I thought too, and I agree. I’d be hard, and whoever built it would likely kill themselves through radiation poisoning, but it could be done.

(bolding mine)

Well, considering your name, that’s not really surprising.

[dropzone]

I don’t reflexively assume politicians are mongering fear, but I’ve known enough to assume they are very unlikely to know what they are talking about on more than one or two specific topics (and one of those is golf). Giving this one the benefit of a doubt, I’m guessing he got confused hearing news stories about a test scheduled this month of an enormous ammonium nitrate/fuel oil bomb that compared it with a low-yield nuke. THAT is something you could make out of stuff from Home Depot, as Tim McVeigh showed us, though it’s obviously not a nuke.

http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jid/jid060504_1_n.shtml

[ambushed]

@CalMeacham

Leaving aside the partisan wrangling, I’d have to dispute the initial assertion. I suspect that the original claim was that you could build a nuclear bomb using parts commonly available at a hardware store (why give *Home Depot[/i a free plug? I’ll bet Lowe’s would be as good. Or your neighborhood hardware store)…

For the record, Shays did indeed explicitly say “Home Depot or Lowes” (but I’m sure all reasonable viewers understood that he meant any large and extensively stocked hardware store). Yet I am certain he did indeed say that you could build a nuclear/atomic explosive from such parts rather than a dirty bomb, implying but not stating outright that you could get everything you need from such a store.

Why do I believe he didn’t mean a dirty bomb with that statement? Because his next, distinctly new statement covered radiological weapons.

[ambushed]

@bibliophage

What kanicbird was referring to has little in common with Pons-and-Fleischman kind of cold fusion.

When electrons are replaced by heavier muons, the smaller atoms have reduced coulomb repulsions between them. Luis Alvarez produced “cold” fusion this way in the 1950s. It’s not really cold, but it requires temperatures much lower than traditional fusion. In order to give the atoms a decent chance of meeting each other before the muons decay, the temperature has to be pretty high (several thousand kelvins, IIRC). There appears to be little practical use for the effect, since it costs more energy to produce the muons than you get back from the fusion.

Thank you, bibliophage. I’m astonished that such a reduction could be significant enough to substantially reduce the necessary temperature for fusion.

But I thought kanicbird was referring to a much more recent announcement (a year ago?) that a respected team produced what they claim was “cold fusion” more or less along the Pons-Fleischman model.

[ambushed]

@kanicbird

Sorry ambushed Wiki is as far as I’m going to go on this one, if it’s wrong feel free to rewrite it.

Muon-catalyzed fusion - Wikipedia

Thank you. But as I wrote above, I thought you were referring to a fairly recent announcement that a reasonably respected team had produced cold fusion a la Pons and Fleischmann (sorry, I don’t have a cite). It is that which I referred to as being strongly debated.