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0 pointsdragontamer4y ago0 comments

> But what if Russia or China has some trick/secret weapon to disable the SLBMs?

Then do they have a secret / trick to disable all briefcase bombs? The Davy Crockett nuke is under 50lbs and was designed for infantry to use (in a almost certainly suicide manner). And then plenty of other types were invented as time went on.

If you can't get them with the big guns, you get them with the small ones, which are still devastating. There are still layers-upon-layers to ensure MAD, as far as I can tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition

And let me remind you: the pipebomb guy from Jan6th hasn't been found yet, despite modern surveillance methods and nearly a year of FBI searching and interviews.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

hunterb1234y ago· 3 in thread

Generally the smaller the bomb the easier it is to sneak it past defenses. You couldn't do enough damage for it to matter on a country scale. You'd have to sneak many small payloads by which would be easier to detect, at that point a larger single payload would be easier to sneak in.

Radioactive payloads are harder to sneak in as ports are scanned with geiger counters, easier to do pipe bombs or fertilizer bombs, etc, but less effective.

To do real collateral damage you have to deliver the payload via the air.

Off-topic nitpick, the pipe bombs were planted on Jan 5th near the DNC and RNC headquarters. There's no known relation to the Jan 6th capitol protest.

lb1lf4y ago

> To do real collateral damage you have to deliver the payload via the air.

-My pet scenario is you just use DHL and ship the thing in a container.

Imagine a handful of nukes going off in, say, the Suez canal, in a lock in the Panama canal, Shanghai, Singapore, LA and Rotterdam.

You don't need to kill billions to bring the world to a halt. We'd face shortages of pretty much everything for quite a long time, with all the difficulties, suffering and general havoc that would bring with it.

laurent924y ago

- Can a state drop enough radioactive contaminants from the air that it would be impossible to detect a Davy Crockett bomb (20kt) in a container?

Arrath4y ago

The weight delta between a man portable device like a Crockett and the expected load of a container is surely enough for a determined actor to shield and disguise the contents well enough to both appear as the normal stated cargo and shield the weapon's emissions from typical port of entry scanning.

cameldrv4y ago

A Davy Crockett may weigh only 50 lbs, but it only has a yield of 20 tons (not kilotons) All of the other super small nukes have small yields (less than 1kT). Besides the fact that they're all decommissioned, they just aren't big enough to the kind of damage people think of when they imagine a nuclear war.

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