railmeat

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Geopolitics in the raw
  Eh? What are you on about? You want a small nuke, look at the SADM or the W54 warhead used on the Davey Crockett recoilless nuclear anti-tank gun. Or the W48, which was designed to fit in a 155mm howitzer shell. Let me also remind you that although these were second-generation warheads, they were US designs from the 1950s. Your comments about Apollo and aerodynamic instability are so wrong-headed I don't know where to begin ... aside from noting that around 99.94% of Apollo's mission profile was exoatmospheric, in which environment aerodynamic handling is not a major concern....
• Charlie Stross commented on Geopolitics in the raw
  I wasn't talking about designing a sub-critical or even a marginally critical warhead, so much as about screening one enough that it's not going to set off Geiger counters. OK? Why on earth would you need to do that? Geiger counters are useless for detecting nuclear weapons, anyway; they're close-up instruments used for ionizing radiation. What you need for fissile cores is some variety of neutron detector, to pick up the product of spontaneous fission events. And the amount of sheilding you need to stop neutrons is ... let's say it's more than you'd find it convenient to jacket a...
• Charlie Stross commented on Geopolitics in the raw
  Sure - as long as the shell is several metres thick. (Thermal neutrons:not so slow ...)...
• Charlie Stross commented on Geopolitics in the raw
  They -are- crazy savages No they're not, they're just really mad at Anglo-Iranian Oil BP....
• Charlie Stross commented on Geopolitics in the raw
  PrivateIron: if/when Japan wants the bomb, the USA won't be able to do anything to stop them getting it. Hint: go look up the size of the Japanese plutonium stockpile. (They've got a fast breeder, you know: google on Monju.) Second hint: they've got an interplanetary space program, too. If they develop an urgent hankering for nukes, they can probably go all the way to H-bomb tipped ICBMs in twelve months. On the other hand? The Japanese government's contingency plan for building nuclear weapons probably begins something like this: "When the USA is no longer willing to provide us with...