Nuclear Pipe Bombs

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Mon Nov 19 12:37:01 PST 2001


On Monday, November 19, 2001, at 12:15 PM, baptista at pccf.net wrote:

> exactly right Ken .. as i said before to Tim May - propaganda is the
> key.  Example - antrax theatre.
>
> i must admit i'm warming up to Tim May's tall pipe means of attaining
> critical mass - much easier then playing with explosive and timing
> devices - my only question is do our experts see a problem with
> that means of delivery?
>

As I made clear in my post, it's not _my_ idea. It's one of the standard 
"basement nuke" proposed designs.

I don't particularly care whether "nuclear terrorist" is added to my 
dossier by the agents in place here on this list, or by other readers, 
but I don't want to get credit not due me. Also, I'm not a nuke designer 
and don't plan to answer questions about neutron crossections, thermal 
excursions before criticality, etc.

I will mention that Ken Brown's "many pieces along the length of the 
pipe" is the worst way to do this: it buys nothing over the two pieces 
approach and it causes all sorts of problems with the pieces getting too 
hot as they come together on the way down. (For example, the penultimate 
chunk falling toward the ultimate chunk...likely to already be melting 
and spraying molten U-235 inside the pipe. Just another fizzle. And 
fizzles are not very interesting, for reasons I stated. A way too 
expensive way to spread mere radiological terror, which could be done 
much more cheaply and easily by taking spent fuel rods and blowing them 
up, or just by grinding up spent fuel rods or other nuclear waste and 
then dumping it out of a plane over a city.)

By the way, some calculations are still needed (by basement nuke 
designers) on what the closing speed needs to be to get a reasonable 
chain reaction yield. The rough calculations I saw said that a fall from 
40 feet, with good tamping behind and all on sides of the masses, would 
work.

But it would be easy enough to accelerate the falling mass even more. An 
explosive charge, maybe even a rocket motor.

(The Little Boy nuke was of course a "gun" design. The maker of a 
basement nuke has the advantage of not having to be portable in even the 
sense that the Hiroshima (Little Boy) and Nagasaki (Fat Man) nukes were 
portable-with-a-big-bomber. The basement nuke can be surrounded by lots 
of shielding (to foil N.E.S.T.), can use lots of tamping material, and 
can be wasteful in use of fissionables.)

--Tim May
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice."--Barry Goldwater





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list