Can a Nuclear Bomb Go Off w/o a launch pad?

mfarraday said:

In my story, a SMALL nuclear bomb created by terrorists is set off in Washington D.C. Two students witness the explosion from across town. Here are my questions:

1. Is it realistic to say they SAW the blast? Obviously, I am planning to have them survive it, because it's a small bomb. I heard of people in Hiroshima having their retinas burned away from the brightness of the explosion they witnessed, and of course it blinded them. I could have my characters simply HEAR the blast and witness the aftermath, of course, to get around this.

2. Is it possible to set off a nuclear bomb without a launch pad? I mean, most launching facilities would attract a lot of attention, right? So it would be difficult/impossible for terrorists to set one up in their backyard etc. Or even in an open field somewhere. You have to assemble these things, they're complicated, and conspicuous, is what I gather. Do I...just google images of 'missile launch pads' and figure out how my terrorist-characters put one together without getting arrested?

ETA: Eureka! I'll just have the launch pad built/hidden underground. Solves a big problem...

3. Am I begging for lots of arguments from readers because my characters survive the blast (even though they need transfusions because their bodies are irradiated by the explosion.) Should I have them be underground in some way, just to make this more plausible? There are a lot of tunnels under Washington D.C.

Thanks for any info, websites that could help me research this, etc. Obviously I need to google some of these things, if the info is out there...

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I'm confused - I'm not sure what you're proposing. A launch pad? Is this a rocket? Launched with what by whom?

I thought you meant a dirty bomb but I'm confused.

Also - transfusions?

If they're across town in D.C. from a nuclear blast, they're pretty screwed, even a dirty bomb. That's not far. There are, online someplace, charts and graphic things showing the various affected zones for various events in at least NYC and I believe D.C. and L.A. as well.

A nuclear blast is intensely blinding, even out several diameters beyond the damage (blast) zone. So yeah, it should definitely be indirect view.

At the most basic level, a nuclear bomb takes two portions of nuclear material, uses standard explosives to smash them together tightly enough to turn the mass critical. Then the nuclear fission starts, runs away, and BOOM.

No propulsion necessary for the device as a whole. Depending on the sophistication of the device, it's going to be fairly big. It won't fit in a duffel or suitcase. It could, but probably won't. More likely, the device is going to be about the size of an office desk.

See if you can get hold of a TV movie called Special Bulletin. It's about a nuclear bomb on a boat in Charleston, SC. In the movie, the bomb goes off. It has a pretty good rundown of the more immediate effects. That should give you a good idea of the scale involved even in a "small" nuclear weapon.

In Clancy's book The Sum of All Fears a nuclear device explodes in a sports stadium. (It's been years since I've read it, but I think the bomb was in a truck.) It fizzles, but it still makes quite a mess.

There's a web site where you can plug in yield and have a look at blast and fall out radii. I'll see if I can find it.

ETA: Here it is -- Nukemap.

mfarraday said:

It's a nuclear bomb. Does it have to be on a rocket? I'm not even sure. Terrorists launch it. It's not a dirty bomb...

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They launch it? That sounds like a rocket. I don't know what it is - it's your story!

If it's not a dirty bomb, well, where'd they get it or how'd they make it? If they got it, did they alter it?

There was a movie in the mid 80s where terrorists were planning on setting off an atomic (not nuclear--see below) bomb near Heathrow airport just as the US president was due to land. Damned if I can remember the name of it, though. If you can find it, it might be worth a watch since it gave some (Hollywoodized, of course) technical details.

You seem pretty well informed on your weapons, so you might already know this, but atomic bombs are what were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They rely on a critical mass of uranium starting a chain reaction that releases a boatload of energy at once. There is only so large an atomic bomb can be, which is small compared to nuclear bombs. Fat Man and Little Boy (oh, another great movie!) were dropped on parachutes so they exploded over the towns to spread out the blast radius. If they had detonated on the ground (like it sounds like yours will be) the damage would be much more limited--the blast would be absorbed by the ground and buildings or reflected up into the sky. Nuclear bombs, on the other hand, are much larger and use atomic bombs as the detonators. A nuclear blast relies on the chain reaction spreading through tritium, and the bomb can be as large as you want provided you have enough tritium. Your terrorists would have a lot easier time getting their hands on an atomic bomb than a nuclear one. "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes is an awesome book and puts the technical details in everyday language.

So, to me it is entirely plausible that someone in DC could survive an atomic blast from a ground-based atomic bomb, even if they were outside when it happened as long as they were far enough away. DC has a wonderful subway system, and if you wanted to be extra sure you could put them on the subway when the blast occurs.

ETA: The Fourth Protocol! That was the movie!

mfarraday said:

Why can't it be suitcase-sized? I heard of a student that did his science project on whether terrorists could create a nuclear bomb small enough to fit in a suitcase...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Project_(film)

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Because if you don't have the critical mass the chain reaction won't happen. It would be like not adding enough water to get the water balloon to pop. They could smuggle in the bomb components, but once assembled it would be the size of a desk, as was mentioned. The uranium itself is (I think) about the size of a slow-pitch softball. It's been a while since I read up on this stuff, so I might be wrong on some of the finer details. In the name-forgotten movie I mentioned above, the terrorists construct the bomb in a hotel room near the airport.

ETA: Just to clarify, although the uranium itself is not very large, all the hardware needed to make the uranium go boom is quite a bit larger.

I don't know the movie about Heathrow that Chris P mentioned, but it might be worth having a look at a range of movies to get an idea of the aftermath -- not just the physical damage to buildings, but the chaos that would ensue.

This looks as though it might be handy: The Dirty War. According to that fount/font of knowledge, Wikipedia:

The film is considered an accurate portrayal of a potential radiological terrorist attack with subsequent emergency response. As such, the film has been used to train American first-responders who may be called upon to respond to similar incidents.

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Guys, a ground blast is WORSE than an air blast. Depending on altitude. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't radioactive early as long because of it. A ground blast generates literally tons of fallout. Long term, decades kind of fallout.

A nuclear weapon that can fit in a suitcase is possible, but requires some very sophisticated technology. Someone mentioned the Manhattan Project, a TV movie (actually an afterschool special if I recall correctly). In it, the small device becomes unstable because the boy didn't adequately shield his electronics against gamma radiation.

The particulars vary, but that's the idea. Small weapons require electronics and controls that are hardened against the inherent radiation of the device.

A "launch pad" is part of a delivery system involving a rocket, which has nothing to do with the bomb itself. The very first nuclear device ever detonated was mounted on a tower.

caw

You probably should read up on the varities of nuclear weapons. The Soviets and the U.S. built "suitcase" bombs in the 1960's, and I assume that there were successful tests of those. They would have been low power plutonium bombs (I believe), and it is conceivable that a terrorist could build one, but it would require a great deal of knowledge and equipment. Pu 239 has a critical mass of just 11 kg, a sphere 4 inches in diameter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239

If you can acquire the best switches, some excellent machine tools, and various remote controlled machinery for forming and assembling the bomb, then it isn't all that difficult. If you can only get minimal machinery and the necessary fissionable material, then you can make a dirty bomb.

It would be a different novel, but you could have a small group of terrorist kill themselves with radiation poisoning or heavy metal poisoning while they were trying to build a bomb.

Helix said:

There's a web site where you can plug in yield and have a look at blast and fall out radii. I'll see if I can find it.

ETA: Here it is -- Nukemap.

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Hah, this kind of website is always amusing (in a creepy way). There was one where you could enter "Chicxulub impact" as the "weapon" (that's the meteor that killed the dinosaurs), which is 2 million times more powerful than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever designed; centered on Paris, it destroys everything between the US and Kazakhstan~

Building nuclear weapons - which is an umbrella term that includes both atomic weapons such as were used in WW2 and thermonuclear weapons developed later - is a highly non-trivial task, technically speaking, even if you can obtain the nuclear material.

The simplest type of atomic weapon is a "gun-type" bomb fueled by uranium-235. Little Boy was an example of a gun-type bomb. This is the kind of weapon were two chunks of fissile material are slammed together. Gun-type weapons are relatively simple and easy to build, but are very inefficient - relatively little of the nuclear material actually reacts, so they require much more than their critical mass to produce an explosion. In addition, they can only be built using uranium-235. Plutonium has a high spontaneous fission rate which means a gun-type plutonium bomb would fizzle.

Very few nuclear weapons are gun-type weapons. Most atomic bombs are implosion weapons: their nuclear material is in the form of a (usually hollow) sphere which is smashed into a small ball by high explosives. Implosion weapons can use both uranium-235 and plutonium-239 and can be much more efficient than gun-type weapons, requiring much less nuclear material and producing a larger explosion. However, they are much more difficult to build. In particular, the implosion needs to be perfectly symmetric or the bomb will fizzle. An implosion weapon is probably out of reach of a terrorist group without significant state support.

(This is leaving aside even more advanced concepts such as linear implosion, fusion-boosted fission weapons, and thermonuclear weapons based on the Teller-Ulam Principle/Sakharov's Third Idea.)

In general, a miniaturized weapon - small enough to fit in a suitcase - is going to be beyond the reach of terrorists to build. These weapons require considerable scientific and technical sophistication to build; you can't make them in a standard machine shop. A terrorist-built device is likely to be extremely bulky and heavy. Take a look at the pictures on wiki of Little Boy for an idea. A terrorist weapon won't need the steel casing, so it won't be quite as big, but it's definitely going to weigh tons and require machinery to move. There's also a significant chance it will be a partial fizzle, failing to develop its full yield.

As for whether your protagonists could witness the blast and survive without being killed or blinded, sure, if they're far away enough. Also, they'd better pray they're upwind. A weapon detonated on contact with the surface will produce significant amounts of local fallout: the vaporized dirt is sucked into the fireball, mixes with the radioactive fission products from the explosion, and then falls back out of the cloud as it recondenses. Fallout shouldn't be too horrible with a low-yield device of this sort, but that's very much a relative term here.

Actually, this might be a perfect solution for your desired effects mix. They might be far enough away from the blast to avoid the direct effects, but close enough and downwind enough to receive a radiation dose from fallout before they manage to evacuate.

Assuming you want them to survive, they should probably absorb about 2 Gray (=200 rad = 200 REM) of radiation. That's a high enough dose that they will have a strong chance of developing acute radiation sickness but, as long as they're in reasonably good health to start with, it's very plausible they would survive. I'm not sure if blood transfusions are recommended at that dose range in a mass disaster, but a) few doctors are actually trained in handling radiation injuries, so they probably won't know either; and b) the doctor is not going to know how much radiation they received, just that they're visibly ill. One thing you should bear in mind, though, is that blood for transfusions is likely to be in extremely short supply, so you might want to examine why they receive transfusions and not someone else. Actually, I suspect most blood would be reserved for people with bleeding injuries, not treatment of radiation casualties.

I'm looking at the map on NUKEMAP generated by a 10 kt surface detonation. The green circle on NUKEMAP is the radius to receive 500 REM from the initial radiation pulse. I don't remember off the top of my head how to figure the 200 REM radius, but if you put them a bit beyond the orange radius you should be okay. At that distance they may receive second-degree burns and are at risk of flying glass, but it's plausible they would not be killed or seriously injured by direct effects. I can dig the formula for the 200 REM radius out of Effects of Nuclear Weapons if it's really important, but that would take a while. Unfortunately, I forget what the blinding radius is; that may be too close for them to be looking directly at the explosion.

I don't think fallout will work here as a contributor to the dose. I'd forgotten how this scales. Even in the red-orange fallout contour (100 rad/hr) it will take them at least two hours to receive a 200 rad dose, and significantly longer if they get under any kind of cover (even just getting inside a building - any building - can cut your dose by a fair amount). It's possible they might be trapped in the fallout zone for that long, but unless you want that to happen, I don't think it will work.

Edit to Add: Actually, now I'm wondering if the radiation contour is really accurate in NUKEMAP. I suspect that doesn't take into account the shielding effects of buildings between the protagonist and the detonation point.

mfarraday said:

It's a nuclear bomb. Does it have to be on a rocket? I'm not even sure. Terrorists launch it. It's not a dirty bomb...

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Google the term "Suitcase Nuke."

By the way, an atomic weapon is incredibly easy to build. The only problem is that WalMart doesn't have an aisle for fissionable material...

Jeff

mfarraday said:

They created it themselves after smuggling uranium into the country.

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Someone else said making a nuke is a "non trivial" task and I think that's the understatement of the year.

To actually make a nuclear weapon would require a very sophisticated operation with considerable resources. And, the make a small one ("suitcase nuke") would be even more difficult.

Do they have to *make* the bomb for your story to work?

No one is 100% sure that all the USSR's nuclear weapons were accounted for after the fall of the Soviet Union. The official line is that "none are missing," but that may not be true.

There's enough wiggle room there that a plot were someone gets an old Soviet bomb from a source in Eastern Europe and smuggles it into the U.S. would work for a story.

As to smuggling it in, the easiest way would be in a cargo container. Only a very small percentage of those are searched.

As to the size of the bomb and how it gets to where it gets set off. Easy, just him them put it in a rental van. No need to stretch credibility even more by having it be handheld.

Park the van in the city, set the timer, walk away...

Oh, and as far as witnesses the blast, have them see the mushroom cloud after the blast, not the actual detonation itself.

EDIT: And yeah, Transfusions? I don't see how that would help if they have been irridiated or, more likely, are suffereing from flash burns and/or radiation burns.

Trebor1415 said:

Someone else said making a nuke is a "non trivial" task and I think that's the understatement of the year.

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I'm a mathematician (though not one working in anything related to nuclear weapons), and "highly non-trivial" is math slang for "really freaking hard".

Trebor1415 said:

No one is 100% sure that all the USSR's nuclear weapons were accounted for after the fall of the Soviet Union. The official line is that "none are missing," but that may not be true.

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Unfortunately (for story purposes, not for the real world), any missing weapons are probably inoperable by now. Nuclear devices require a surprising amount of maintenance. Refurbishing an old weapon might be easier than building one from scratch, though.

Trebor1415 said:

EDIT: And yeah, Transfusions? I don't see how that would help if they have been irridiated or, more likely, are suffereing from flash burns and/or radiation burns.

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That actually is a treatment for acute radiation sickness. I don't know why - I would guess to replenish the white blood cells killed by radiation, but I'm not a doctor.

asnys said:

That actually is a treatment for acute radiation sickness. I don't know why - I would guess to replenish the white blood cells killed by radiation, but I'm not a doctor.

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I wasn't aware of that. Good to know.