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Originally Posted by kalos72
Side note: Could a nuclear warhead be used like that? I am guessing thats the start of a dirty bomb post war.
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You disable either the sphere of explosives surrounding the subcritical core, or damage the explosive charge triggering the gun mechanism, and you have a nice dirty bomb explosion without an actual nuclear explosion. You'd have to damage them in such a way as to allow for a conventional explosion to still take place -- specialized skill, but one could probably have found out how in the average college library before or even after the war. I would guess you'd take a good dose of rads in the process of your work, however.
I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it.
What I don't think would happen, however, is the survival of a nuclear missile warhead intact as it hits the ground, even if it is a dud. You'd have the equivalent of a dirty bomb hit right there. An aircraft-delivered bomb might be another story, however, as would a case where the aircraft crashes with intact nuclear weapons on board (there was a scenario in
Challenge magazine to that effect -- a B-1 crashes near the Crazy Horse monument).
EDIT: I do remember reading in the late 1970s about warheads that were designed to survive a ground penetration and explode underground -- they were meant to take out missile silos through seismic shock.