Neglect measured on the scale of centuries might make them effectively safe…you need to have all the conventional explosives in the implosion shell fail to explode. If some of them fail, you likely won’t reach criticality in the warhead itself, in which case you just detonated a regular bomb that had enriched uranium shrapnel.
That being said, most modern explosives become less stable and more sensitive over time, not inert. So the implosion timing is gonna be off, which means no criticality. Just spreading radioactive material.
Umm. Not really? I’m kinda pulling together basic implosion-type nuke design, where you have a nuclear core surrounded by conventional shaped charges that are supposed to detonate and compress the nuclear core just prior to the nuclear reaction.
As you would expect, most governments are a bit touchy on details about military explosives that they use…I just happen to have done a decent amount of explosives R&D in the past. Picked up a few things.
Neglect measured on the scale of centuries might make them effectively safe…you need to have all the conventional explosives in the implosion shell fail to explode. If some of them fail, you likely won’t reach criticality in the warhead itself, in which case you just detonated a regular bomb that had enriched uranium shrapnel.
That being said, most modern explosives become less stable and more sensitive over time, not inert. So the implosion timing is gonna be off, which means no criticality. Just spreading radioactive material.
Do you have a source to read further on this at all?
Umm. Not really? I’m kinda pulling together basic implosion-type nuke design, where you have a nuclear core surrounded by conventional shaped charges that are supposed to detonate and compress the nuclear core just prior to the nuclear reaction.
As you would expect, most governments are a bit touchy on details about military explosives that they use…I just happen to have done a decent amount of explosives R&D in the past. Picked up a few things.