Can nuclear missiles simply be shot mid-air? Wouldn't they still detonate and cause a lot of radiation?

*1st post, my bad

wikipedia link level of what?

Why the hell are people in the US worried about Nork missiles then? They would be shot down the second they leave North Korea

Do some reading about missile defense. With the norks, it's a possibility, but missile interception is a much harder problem than you seem to think.

thinking you can detonate a nuclear weapon by shooting it is like thinking you can make tacos by blowing up a cow

You stupid jackass.
For even a compression nuke you need pure U-235 just to start with.

Guys I think he's referencing more along the lines of a dirty bomb, which absolutely could happen. The odds of triggering a nuclear detonation with a kinetic impact are zero but you absolutely will scatter the nuclear fuel and potentially at a high altitude. It's still infinitely better than an actual nuclear detonation though.

shooting down an ICBM is hard. they fly very high and very fast. when they come down, they're moving at over 24 times the speed of sound. many of them also deploy decoys and countermeasures to hide exactly where they are.

no anti-ballistic missile system has ever been demonstrated that has the ability to intercept something like that.

Not yet at least.

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cancelled ten years ago because it didn't work

U-235 and Pu-239 are not anywhere near radioactive enough to be particularly dangerous when scattered by an impact. It's the fission products that tend to cause the health issues associated with nuclear fallout and reactor meltdowns.

There are multiple stories about production and development of MOKV from late 2017 and early 2018. So I think you might be mistaken.

Interesting. If that's the case then why the big scare about "dirty bombs"? Just media ignorance/hype?

>but you absolutely will scatter the nuclear fuel

who cares? that stuff doesn't hurt you.

here's some guys literally holding plutonium in a magnesium box. no shielding whatsoever.

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MOKV and MKV are two entirely separate projects you dingus.

>he has never made cow bomb tacos

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That's probably why he's asking a question, dumbass.

Literally yes.

Dirty bombs would likely use nuclear waste which consists of significantly more radioactive isotopes than the fission fuel used in bombs.

>Tbh I always wondered this about anti-missile missiles. Kinda defeats the point?
The point is to defeat the point of the other missile

Then what are dirty bombs?

partly that any terrorist could make a dirty bomb out of common medical radiological waste, but mostly hype

Explosives scatter radioactive materials.

bombs intentionally made so that they still achieve nuclear fission, but do not detonate "cleanly" and make use of a very small percent of fissile material in the bomb to create energy. Essentially it's just half-detonating a nuke so the fission products irradiate the area. You still need fission to make fission products.

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A scare tactic

THAAD and SM-3 both have the demonstrated capability to destroy terminal phase ICBMs and in fact have been doing so for years now including MIRV scenarios.

The era of hypersonic ICBMs are a strategic threat is quickly coming to an end.

Trinity, Nagasaki, Demon cores?

Yes

>72% success rate

mda.mil/global/documents/pdf/testrecord.pdf

well I guess this is okay if you only want to win 72% of the war

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A dirty bomb doesn't necessarily require fission to occur. The main purpose of the weapon is to scatter a given area with highly radioactive fission products.

>A dirty bomb doesn't necessarily require fission to occur

it doesn't require it at all. a dirty bomb is literally just a normal bomb with some radioactive material in it. if it fissioned, then it would be a nuke, not a dirty bomb.

If you shoot down 72% of the others guys shit, and the other lacks the ability to shoot down your shit, you indeed won.

You might have a bloody nose, but the other fucker will be ash.

>Can nuclear missiles simply be shot mid-air?

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The image that I posted came up when I searched for MOKV, gaylord. How the fuck am I supposed to know what it looks like?

Not when the laser is on the bottom of the plane.

Yes, look up the YAL-1

>How the fuck am I supposed to know what it looks like?

By actually being familiar with the topic being discussed. Since you're not, why did you even join the conversation to begin with?

28% is more than enough to do some serious damage. If, for example, the enemy shoots 1,000 missiles at you, and you intercept 720 of them, that leaves 280 missiles. If those missiles have MIRV's, that could be almost 3,000 remaining warheads. I feel like I could obliterate any country on Earth with 3,000 warheads...even 300 warheads is more than enough. Also, you don't "win" a nuclear war, you can only lose less.

The GBI's, AEGIS (SM3s), and THAAD all use a Kinetic warhead which is going at such speed, combined with the speed of the warhead simply vaporizes both.

The replies you got for this are asinine

The difference is mostly height and purpose.

Regarding height, if a nuke detonates at ground level, there's a lot more material to be irradiated and scattered. The higher up a missile is destroyed (or detonates) the less problematic ground level radiation is. With a dirty bomb, it would be detonated *at* ground level.

More important is the purpose. The entire point of a dirty bomb is to create terror by irradiating an area, not actually destroying anything like a nuke. The actual radioactive material used can vary but doesn't actually matter. Any press statement, news headline, or any other acknowledgment of terrorists detonating a dirty bomb would be devastating. Even if no one ultimately died and the radiation amount was trivial, you'd still need to provide immediate medical care, even if just precautionary, for anywhere from a few hundred people to easily tens of thousands and still have to clean the fuck out of the area. Beyond that, you'd have to deal with the economic and political consequences (shutting down and evacuating Manhatten for just a few days could be catastrophic). If *literally* nothing else, there would be widespread panic immediately following confirmation. Every cough and headache would become radiation sickness and anything seemingly out of the ordinary would become the next bomb waiting to go off.

tl;dr
A dirty bomb is a weapon of fear more than anything else. You should not be afraid of a dirty bomb because it might kill you or lots of people, you *should* be afraid of what the world could be like after one is used. Just imagine all the fear, consequences, and effects resulting from 9/11, but amplified 10 times over. The media is retarded in general, but a dirty bomb is a problem, even their reasons are wrong.

It's why you dedicate more than one interceptor to each missile, the first salvo of interceptors knocks the volume of warheads down to 28%, the next salvo reduces it to 8%, the third down to 3.3%

That's a lot of interceptors. In our 3,000 warhead scenario, you would need 9,000 interceptors minimum. If the enemy has effective decoys, you can either wait until the warheads fall below the altitude at which their decoys are stripped away by the thickening atmosphere (at which point you only have enough time for 1 salvo of interceptors), or you can just fire multiple interceptors at everything you see, decoy or not, which mean you might need something like 18,000 interceptors...or more.

Building and deploying that many interceptors, with the right amount at the right locations to intercept what the enemy throws at it is obviously not likely...and all of it can be defeated by just shooting more nukes at it, or just shooting some nukes at it to make you waste interceptors, or attacking the interception sites themselves...and on and on.

I mean there are actual reasons why these things have not been built. I think you should read further into this subject.

Not him, but that's assuming an awful lot. In no particular order...

>that that success rate will be true even for the first salvo of interceptors
>that the success rate can be compounded for the following salvos
>that you can whittle the remainder down fast enough to matter
>that the missiles be intercepted over the entire course of their flight, as opposed to particular stages like most ABM systems operate
>that the systems and procedures in place can fully and properly handle such a massive difference in circumstances and succeed at the same 72% rate
>that you're willing to spam your interceptors and risk not having enough to respond to second, third, etc strikes
>that you have enough batteries in the right places to even target all the missiles
>that the batteries can fire fast enough
>that you'd have enough interceptors
>that you wouldn't try to prioritize or exclusively focus on certain launches/missiles, deciding that protecting certain targets is more important than protecting others,

inb4:
>well obviously you'd just fire the interceptors in quick enough succession to deal with [insert above assumption]
Well then you're just wasting missiles on targets that have already been destroyed

>just make enough batteries and interceptors/place them everywhere needed
That's a whole lot of money, time, resources, and political capital for a marginal benefit that more likely than not will never be needed, and that could be used on more pressing and practical issues

If we're talking about a few missiles being launched by, say, Iran or NK then we're safe. We have systems in place to stop that volume of incoming threats.

If we're talking about hundreds of modern ICBMs and thousands of hypersonic vehicles than obviously no we're not safe. That is what MAD is supposed to deter.

Is a high altitude nuclear detonation even a fallout factor?

The sphere style is rarely used.
They use the "ball and tube" nowadays.
The "demon core" was handled by hand, literally carried around in scientists pockets.
Deaths from radiation from it only occurred when the two half-spheres came into contact with each other.
Im guessing Trinity device would have been detonated already. I don't believe we had 3 cores worth of material when that test was performed.
Its more likely fat man core, litre boy core and demon core.

>litre boy core
Little boy used 2 U-235 slugs of differing size and shape, though. Would it be in the same type of container as the plutonium spheres?

No. If it can't knock significant quantities of material from the ground into the air, then the only source of radioactive material would be the components of the warhead itself (< 300 lbs), comparatively little mass.

If it is '45, it would probably be trinity/Fat man/demon, simply given how low the production rate was back then, and that by August they would be down to 1 core. It could be October or beyond, though.

The gun-type is a completely different architecture.

The primary stage is still an implosion ("spherical") device.

Not nukes.

>Can you shoot a nuclear missile?
Yes

>Will it detonate?
No. An atomic bomb is a very delicate and complicated device to create and very briefly sustain a chain reaction that operates in no way like a conventional explosion.

Blowing one up will no more make it work properly then throwing a hand grenade at a Mr. Coffee will get you a mug of joe.

>Three cores worth of material.

We had more then that at Hanford, but not machined.

A dirty bomb isn't a weapon of fear. It is an actual weapon that kills with radiation. Why would I not be concerned about devices that can render land uninhabitable for hundreds of years or more?

The detonation disperses the radioactive material, which decreases the intensity, which decreases the dosage received by anyone there. They also aren't going to be large enough to achieve effects comparable to say, the local fallout caused by a ground-burst. The intensity-half life relationship means that the radioisotopes that would be around long enough to contaminate an area for "hundreds of years or more" would not be radioactive enough to cause the dramatic damage that would make it intrinsically deadly, while the radioisotopes intense enough to have visible health effects would be too short-lived, scattered and (probably) little in number to do much. The main effect of a dirty bomb would be psychological.

>hundreds of years or more
Worst case scenario is a Co-60 salted fission weapon, which would cause issues for a generation at most. Conventional dirty bombs run into a lack of radioactive material mass and the means to spread it to truly deny access to an area.

You both say this, but I can take a plane ticket right now to the Ukraine or Japan and literally go see irradiated areas that can not be inhabited. And that damage was unintentional. You then try and state what a worst case scenario is, but that's not possible. You can not know what materials might be used by anyone that would attempt such an action.

Both of those cases involve literal tons of fission products concentrated in an extremely small area. Aside from the fact that a group interested in detonating a dirty bomb would be unlikely to be able to get a hold of radioactive waste material above medical disposal quantities, dispersing the material rapidly reduces its effectiveness as it decays down to less radioactive byproducts.

It's also unlikely 12 foreign terrorists could hijack 4 planes and successfully attack three targets, but it happened.

They don't cause fission, they just blow up a big pile of radioactive material which then becomes airborne.

Fuck you kunt

Actually, why not put nuclear warheads on interceptors? That would decrease precision required, no?

Almost certainly, but why intentionally dump fallout on your own nation?

They could be launched from the sea or air, or at least early enough to detonate above the ocean, but even if they have to detonate above land, thats still better than milions dead i think

That's quite different from stealing a literal reactor vessel from a power plant.

Do at least some nuclear missiles not come with a some sort of self destruct protocol that activates the nuke when the missile is compromised, such as when hit by an interceptor? It won't make sense for an ICBM but something used over shorter distances like a tactical nuke might be better off destroying an empty part of an opponent's land rather than doing nothing.

the big secret nobody will tell you is that anti-missile tech is basically a crapshoot, if it's an ICBM fucking forget about it. especially with MIRVs. if someone sends a nuke your way, you're dying, no matter what Raytheon and Lockheed Martin tell you in their powerpoints

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The BIGGER secret is that eventually ICBMs will be 99% interceptable

Let's be honest, terrorists are going to get their hands on a nuclear weapon at some point one way or another

Why steal it instead of killing the site personal and killing the power. Blow holes in the coolant pipes and hold off attempts to retake the site until that bitch melts down.

Nobody knows for sure. Real war always throws such assumptions out of the window. Half of the things we think will work won't work. It's literally always like this especially after longer periods of peace.

>a nuke dummy
That’s exactly what I would expect. Looks like a nuke, has nuke gizzards, but doesn’t do nuke things: a nuke dummy.

Except that we test these systems and they have a very high success rate and it keeps getting better.

Don’t we finally have lasers that can actually intercept warheads and missiles? Honestly, how long will it be until we reach a point where strategic level nuclear warfare is simply obsolete and wars with superpowers just becomes another thing that happens on the regular?

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That's why nuclear power facilities have some of the most high speed dudes you'll ever encounter. DOE shooters are no joke, they commonly smoke most Tier One oper8tors in competitions...

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It would have already happened, if it was going to ever happen. The fall the soviet union was the prime time for terrorist groups to get their hands on a nuke and nobody did.

>Blow holes in the coolant pipes and hold off attempts to retake the site until that bitch melts down.
That wouldn't really accomplish much other than wrecking the reactor and possibly making the site unusable for a little while.

Then your equipment is fucked so the other missiles will hit.

I'm not seeing why that would deter or stop achmed. I mean the goat fuckers have sent 7,000 us troops home in body bags and have no problem with operations with no return ticket.

Id the reactor has no power and no circulating coolant the decay from the fuel will evaporate what coolant is left and begin melting down. That's literally what Fukushima was.

>That's literally what Fukushima was.
Yeah and how many people have died as a result of the fukushima melt down to date?

At Fukushima they where able to begin working on it immediately. It didn't have a facility filled with angry goat fuckers in it.

Fukushima had lot more problems than you make it seem.

Plutonium is unstable, and will self collapse and reach critical mass all on its lonesome.
Really scary stuff.
It's carefully engineered to control how big a boom it makes and to prevent it from going boom without direction.

0 zero people have died from the Fukushima melt down.

>At Fukushima they where able to begin working on it immediately. It didn't have a facility filled with angry goat fuckers in it.
It took 26 hours for reactor 3 to start melting down after the coolant system shut down and one of the main reasons that the melt down happened at all is because the tsunami damage stopped replacement equipment from being brought in.

>The Japanese government has recognized for the first time that a worker at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has died as a result of radiation exposure. The power plant suffered a severe meltdown during the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

time.com/5388178/japan-first-fukushima-radiation-death/

Just because no one died instantly doesn't mean the accident had no deaths.

So one person has died nearly a decade after the event. This sounds like a much more effective plot than grabbing the nearest truck.

GBD has, the problem with intercepting nukes is there will just be too many in a MAD exchange.

Anti missile technology is a meme. None of it works, it's just faggots trying to outsmart Von Neumann and get around game theory.
It will most likely not detonate, nukes have several safeties that need to be tripped in order to go off. Even if it does, they aren't detonated at ground level, there's an optimal height on an airburst. Detonate too early and you'll not get any ground reflection, possible not hit ground at all, too late and your coverage shrinks. Too too high and you just have an EMP. Look at the Air 2 GENIE test and Starfish Prime.

Causing 187 billion in damage, rendering 24 square miles permanently inhabitable, and forcing the host nation to increase it's spending on the defense of it's nuclear power plants indefinitely. Thats an excellent trade from an asymmetric point of view. And thats if it is "only" as bad as Fukushima.

Having to double up your nukes per target to guarentee a hit means you can only hit half as many.

>Stage 3: Bargaining.

>Causing 187 billion in damage
Not even remotely true. It'll cost 15 billion over 20 years to clean up the plant; all other forecast expenditure is compensation claims over the evacuation and having to build a bunch of coal plants because they're too scared to build another nuclear plant.

>24 square miles permanently inhabitable
Also not even remotely true. Not to mention that the evacuation was deemed unnecessary as early as 2005, due to the low level of radiation actually released. Virtually all of the human and economic cost caused by Fukushima has been the fault of the Japanese government who decided to play security theater with a mass evacuation.

Either way, they're terrorists not mild-inconveniencers. Doing a minuscule amount of financial damage to their target nation isn't of interest to them, otherwise they would just attack pipelines and other infrastructure.

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/misc/criticality/

Here is how you do it

187 is the cost and there is an uninhabitable 24 mile exclusion zone. Terrorist frequently attack infrastructure including but not limited to oil pipelines, oil rigs, oil tankers, electrical substations, and airports.