Vance said it too. Pushed it way harder actually.

On national TV. And was immediately called out on it. And doubled down. And people still voted for that pile of waste.

Go rub yerself against bad american people!

Imagine pulling the trigger and you have to endure radiation sickness for days or weeks before you get your virgins, smh.

That wouldn't be a suicide vest, though; it'd be a suicide fat suit.

I don’t think anyone wants even a 1kt device going off near them

Pussies.

"watch closely, because I'm only going to show you once"

It's not just reliably sticking the two subcritical halves of fissile material together, but keeping them there via inertia long enough for enough of the mass to go critical before the much more minor reactions blow them apart via melting/vaporizing the nearest surfaces.

If you had to halves of an atomic bomb core and just clacked them together mechanically you'd wind up with a lot of heat and a big old pulse of radiation, and if you were the one holding this device you probably would indeed die. But there would be no nuclear explosion in the sense we think of it as compared to actual functional nuclear weapons. At best you'd wind up with an energy release equivalent to a few pounds of TNT, which would be much easier to replicate with... a few pounds of TNT.

This has been explored to death, e.g. via the Demon Core experiments, where a critical mass of fissile material was brought together via manual means and the end result was the release of enough radiation to kill at least two people (albeit certainly not killing them instantly) but no explosion.

There's a difference between meltdown, inefficient/low explosion, & efficient high-explosion.

The neutron-emission's cascading only when the critical-mass is in small-enough a volume,

& the heat it's producing is making it blow-apart.

( I've seen video of 1 million watts of heat being produced by a 1-cubic-metre reactor-core, in a water-cooled reactor.. the heat the reaction produces makes the fuel-rods incandescent, or at-least that's the way it looked, in that video: it may have been Cherenkhov-radiation that I was seeing, or from gamma-rays being converted down to light or something.. dunno.. )

the more efficient you want the fission-reaction to be, the longer you have to force it together, while it's blowing-up.

The explosives are required, for bombs, ttbomk.

_ /\ _

Does it negatively affect my billionaire friends? ...is the only question they care about

If it might lower the number of children they could sexually assault, Republicans will definitely care.

Yes.

DOGE fired them.

Loooool fixed the typo xD

Thanks!

I accidentally brought handcuffs into a flight on August 2001. The TSA agent who found them asked what I planned to do with them.

Being a teenager, the answer was obviously that I kept them in my jacket to pull them out and show my high-school friends how quirky and cool I was. But being a teenager, I didn’t realize how endearing that response would be, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, which was somehow better and worse.

“I’m visiting my girlfriend!”

She gave me a slow blink and said “Well, alright then, go get your freak on!” (Or something of a similar sentiment - time has robbed me of the exact phasing.)

Pre-9/11 security in American airports was wild to me. There had been a load of plane hijackings in Europe before my time so it was always fairly locked down but I distinctly remember San Diego airport you could basically walk in off the street and nearly be at the plane when people were disembarking in the late 90s.

Airport security pre-9/11 was pretty horrendous. Hijackings were surprisingly common compared to today, but the difference was that it was usually for a ransom and/or demanding that the plane go somewhere else. This led to a general policy of just going along with hijackers and letting the authorities deal with it later. The most famous example of this kind of scenario is D. B. Cooper.

An important thing to remember about Aviation in general is that every lesson is written in blood. This leads me to PSA 1771. In 1987 a disgruntled former airline employee got on plane, shot his boss and the flight crew, then intentionally crashed the plane killing everyone else. This incident was entirely caused by the poor security practices at the time. The perpetrator's employee ID hadn't been taken back when he was fired and because he had those credentials he was able to get on the plane without being searched.

The problem wasn't the knife regulation. We should allow such tiny knives on planes. They're harmless. You can go to a fancy restaurant in the airport and get served steak with a steak knife. You can bring an object with a glass piece in it, smash the glass once you're passed security, and have a small bladed weapon that way. You can bring in dull metal and file into a sharp edge on the tile of the floor of the family bathroom prison shive style. It's trivially easy to get such a small bladed weapon inside the security cordon. Hell, some people have finger nails that are more dangerous than those knives.

The real impactful change after 9/11 was reinforcing the cockpit doors, and putting in regulations requiring them to remain closed and locked during flight. That was the real impactful change. The TSA's just security theater.

Both you and your grandpa were right. But you both missed the real solution.

so would any explosive device, or chemical agent, or two smaller assassins in a trench coat. If they do go the nuke vest route, I hope they put a bunch of light graphics on it to be really edge lord and scary with it

It’s not something that can really fit on a vest, but I suppose you could hide it in a fat suit, a wheelchair, or a fake pregnancy belly.

Maybe that's why people keep backing away from Trump. It's not incontinence, it's their dosimeter badges.

I love how inconspicuous it is:

Like something from Looney Tunes.

They cannot build a W54. This would be an early prototype device and that would not fit on a vest. Iran only has enriched uranium, not plutonium (according to news reports). It takes a great deal more uranium than plutonium to build a bomb. About 65ish kilos of +90% enriched for a uranium bomb.

The W54 is a shaped charge implosion device. To build a W54, they'd need plutonium. And the trigger to detonate shaped charges at the right time in the right order. Plus, they need a neutron moderator to limit criticality so it doesn't detonate with the full potential of the nuclear material. This is all well beyond Iran's capabilities.

Russia could do it though. Probably China too. North Korea? I think not.

I'm not a nuclear weapons designer, I've just read some books. But my understanding is that shaped charge implosion is better for Pu designs. It does require much less material to reach criticality. Maybe 8-9kg? vs 65kg for a U device. But I don't think Iran has been refining Pu, just U.

A backpack device is BIG. It could not be concealed like a suicide vest. It also requires nuclear materials (plutonium) and a specialty implosion design and triggers Iran does not have.

yeah the idea that Iran would use humans as delivery mechanism for nuclear weapons is a form of racist fetishization. it's maddening, this man. but then. i'm appalachian. i'm the hillbilly that racist carpet-baggging son of a bitch hayseed spoke ill of in his book. and i swear to GOD that man put soap in the cast iron skillet i'm gonna hit him in the face with

FWIW, wp:Suitcase nuclear device.

Allegations were made in the 1990s that Israel had developed suitcase nuclear bombs during the 1970s.[28]

The nuclear vest bomb was in a movie I have a feeling have just watched.