• ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Quick question. Would shooting down a plane carrying a nuke cause the nuke to go off?

    Sounds like one hell of a kamikaze run

    • JayObey711@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      No, the detonator of an atomic bomb is a little bomb itself. The energy required to to detonate is much greater than anyplaincrash could cause. I find it amusing (relatively, we are still talking about weapons of mass destruction) that a thermonuclear bomb need a regular atomic bomb to trigger, wich needs a regular bomb to detonate. So we are just stacking bombs on bombs on bombs to make them stronger.

      • Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        the detonator of an atomic bomb is a little bomb itself.

        Just to clarirify, the explosion needed to set off a nuke is far from little. Am implosion type nuke uses a bit over 2 tons of high explosives to set off the core.

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Nukes are difficult enough to detonate intentionally, so no, it probably won’t happen. I mean it probably will detonate, but it’ll just be the conventional explosives in it. The fissile material that was supposed to explode will instead get thrown all over the place.