assuming the ICBM is a nuclear warhead…. Doesn’t the whole process behind a nuclear warhead involve an explosion that propels the nuclear “fuel” to start a chain reaction? i.e. exploding a warhead will essentially be the same as the explosion that causes the isotope to undergo fission?
ig the same can be said about conventional bombs as well but nuclear is more confusing.
In: Chemistry
As a former US Army Air Defense Artillery soldier (14E PATRIOT FIRE CONTROL) – I’ll chime in.
A nuclear device has a certain sequence to explode. You don’t want it going off if it’s dropped.
A missile shot at an ICBM would hit it hard enough to smash the warhead and scatter the bits far and wide. Yes that’s dangerous, but at a high enough altitude it’s much less dangerous than a nuclear explosion.
Notice I said smash – at the altitudes we’re talking about, the interceptor is “hit to kill”. That means it uses its speed and mass to destroy the ICBM because weight is at a premium.
So the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) slams into the warhead hard enough to smash it into small bits with enough force to scatter them about.
Nuclear bombs require extreme precision to detonate properly.
The fusion reaction in a thermonuclear warhead is triggered by a fission reaction, so all nuclear weapons will involve the detonation of a fission device.
The fission reaction is triggered by detonating conventional explosives around a sphere of fissile material, usually plutonium. The explosives need to compress the plutonium sphere. The fission reaction can only happen while the plutonium sphere is compressed.
To get the conventional explosives to detonate properly, they must be ignited at many different points. Think of a soccer ball shape, but there’s an ignition device on the center of each face. An arrangement like that was used for Fat Man. If the conventional explosives are triggered by an outside device, the plutonium sphere will be blown to pieces rather than compressed.
People have the wrong assumption of how nuclear weapons work. They’re not nitroglycerine, they don’t explode if you breathe on them wrong. In fact you can drop them, hit them, destroy them, and the chances that they accidentally go off are next to zero, because the only way a nuclear warhead ever goes off is if a very specific mechanism triggers a very specific reaction in a very specific way so that it can actually create a nuclear explosion. Change anything in those conditions, like trying to make it go without the specific firing mechanism, disturbing the structure and arrangement of components in any way, and it won’t go off. It’s a dud. A wet fart.
That would actually be an interesting mechanism. If the ICMB senses external interruption (i.e. a missile), it’ll explode into the atmosphere.
Most ICBM intirceprors are not aiming for the warhead they are going for the fuel stored in the middle of missle. They aum to destory the missle while lwaving the warhead intact. So any explosion is likely due to a fail safe and not overpressure by the explosion triggering the warhead due to how high the trigger pressures are and generally are not that heat sensitive even in the case of breaching the casing. Modern day nukes are not what they cooked up in the manhattan project.
For conventional bombs they are often far more senstive to heat and pressure. This can trigger the explosives to well go boom. Even kn a hit that missed the warhead due to heat alone. Conventional weapons are based in semi-voilitle chemical compounds that are one or two steps away from blowing themselves up.
The fissionable material slips out without igniting. Most of it. Some might go off.
Going nuclear means the atoms split. They only split when they’re squeezed really tightly and send knocking into each other.
The gun-type nuclear bomb over Hiroshima only used about 2% of all it’s uranium. They just rammed one part into another. The very surface layer went nuclear. But then the blast of that layer exploding spread out and wasted the other 98%. Still a big boom. All bombs since then work at squeezing all the material into all the other material. It’s a really tricky detonation.
It’s like, uhhhhh, a semi-truck full of barrels of oil. If it crashes and explodes, the barrels can either be rupture and explode themselves, or they can be tossed out harmlessly to the side.
It’s like trying to lift a helicopter into the air by blowing it up, except triggering a nuclear explosion is even more complicated than lifting a helicopter
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