i was thinking if nukes yeild the highest power to weight ratio.

>>31355446
Because that would be very expensive and at the range you'd be engaging with a bullet you would get lethal doses of radiation.

>>31355446
It's incredibly hard to fission anything smaller than around 10kg (correct me if I'm wrong) of uranium or plutonium, and you'd likely just end up with a lot of radiation poisoning and cancer for the production and soldiers alike.
Even the mini nuke in real life, the Davy Crocket nuclear mortar, was only just able to clear it's effective explosion radius, so I dont think using nuclear tank shells or bullets is any good idea to be honest even if it was possible.

>>31355446
Gonna be hard to make that little radio active materiel go critical.

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>>31355446
I'm sure you already know the answer, but just incase:
>Nuclear material is incredibly expensive and incredibly time consuming to produce for weapons.
>Nuclear weapons require very precise engineering to work properly.
>Nuclear weapons are radioactive, which makes them hazardous to carry, and spreads radiation where they are used as well.

>>31355512
Plutonium is around 5kg. I'm not sure but I think you can use neutron reflecting material around it to reduce this but not by a factor needed for a bullet.

9mm may be TOO small, however 50cal. might work. Then again, it's radio active, so soldiers fielding this ammo would get all kinds of cancer fairly quickly.

HOWEVER, we could build a mini nuke (1kg "lowgrade" plutonium gets u ~1kt boom) and put it into a backpack and drive it via an IED robot to an enemy position. SHould wipe out a carpool fairly easily.


Back to your idea though, you could AT MAX put 10g or highest grade Uranium into a 50cal bullet (theres other stuff you would have to fit into there too), that would roughly add up to a 0,2kt bomb. Thats just a force of 200kg TNT, and for that its just too expensive/ not worth the risks (cancer etc).

We've got bombs that can do the same, and such a bullet would cost the same.

Meh, coming to 40mm grenades, what you could put into it would most likely kill you since you'd still be in blast range.

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I'd like to welcome the NRC & the BATFE to the thread.

>>31355512
>>31355591

Basically this. Anything small enough to achieve critical mass is not going to be something you can fit in a shoulder fired weapon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

>>31355604
Thinking a bit further tough, you could maybe invent a bullet with a capsule in it which would release some kind of bacteria to shoot at enemy water supplies. Might be illegal, but meh. (taofledermaus much?)

Maybe put a bouncing betty mechanism to phosphor nades... that would be THE SUCK to encounter.

Or just go full on fuck it mode and make bouncing betties spreading mustardgas or anthrax or whatever. Sure, you'd be a war criminal and executet and all, but noone would fuck with ur country ever again. (No one in their right minds invades the dragon dildo lair.)

hmmm... buckshot contaminated with aids... hmmm

>>31355622
Just looked it up; 5kg of plutonium is around 280ml or 9oz which means that's the smallest your projectile can be if it were made solely of plutonium. But you can't have that, because you have to keep it separate to keep it subcritical.

>>31355684
Look up the M1 biodart and big five weapons in general
>>31355688
The warhead requires fuzing and the explosive lenses or other method of rapid compression in addition to the nuclear material.

>>31355722
Well, guess you gotta hire some serbs to make it "legal" (?)

God i love the serbs and their no bs attitude.

>>31355684
Rumor has it that the suicide bombers in Gaza deliberately infect themselves with Hepatitis C and AIDS so their body parts infect others. Even if someone survives the blast, they might get a gift that keeps on giving. bleck!!

It's possible, but would contaminate the fuck out of the area around it.

IIRC you could feasibly create a nuclear explosion with about twice the general explosive force of an M67 using a few grams of one of the californium variations (I forget which one exactly but it's one of the cheaper ones, though cheap is still expensive as fuck when talking about californium), however it's still incredibly dirty. Basically a small superfund site in a football sized box.

>>31355722
it still creates a fairly hefty explosion, even if you went with the minimal amount of plutonium.. It's been long enough since I researched this that I've forgotten the exact tonnage.

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>>31356780

>>31359781
solely having the material to maintain critical mass isn't the entire size constraint though, as you'll need other shit like neutron defelctors and other stuff to get it supercritical.

i don't know i'm drunk. but 5kg of plutonium isn't a whole lot but at the same time the US has maybe-maybe not come up with designs for suitcase nukes and you can expect that to pretty much be the smallest you can go for nukes maybe. Perhaps a bit smaller you could cut some dimensions here and there. hardly a 9mm bullet though.

>>31361380
Exactly, a trigger mechanism is fairly complex. Cant just downsize it like a laptop.

>>31356780
Rumor has it that Israel bioengineered the AIDS virus to infect the arabs.

Is the concept of a red mercury bomb just science fiction?

>>31355684
>spreading mustardgas or anthrax
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol#Chemical_weapons_prohibitions

>>31355446
The heaviest part of a nuke is not the fissile material, but all the other stuff that makes it reach critical mass.

So, for a 9mm round, you'd have no room for the fissile material, and the explosive lenses, and the neutron reflectors.

Also, there's no explosive available that could make such a small amount of fissile material go critical.

>>31355446
Because that's retarded go back to /v/

>>31356780
Rumor has it Jews are literally cancer so when one is exploded he infects everyone around him with cancer

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As far as I know, the smallest nuke ever developed was for a 155mm artillery shell, and I'm not sure if that was even a legitimate thing. I would look it up, but since you have the internet you can do your own fucking research.

Besides all the scientific reasons you couldn't get critical mass at that size, the most prohibitive thing about your idea would be the cost. The 9mm round would most likely be worth several times the cost of the tank.

Just look at the debt the US racked up shooting Mavericks at goat carts.

>>31355446
Because depleted uranium anti armor has been a thing for a while now.

>>31355446
I'll be the dick...
Go read something from the non science fiction section. Stop being a fucking idiot.

>>31356780
Just a tip... Americans and English don't say "bleck".

Pic related... another tip.

>>31355684
Rule 2, kid.

>>31355620
I wonder if alphabet agencies get excited when they see an alert pop up from their scans from 4chan.

Just cause it would break the monotony of other duties.

>>31355553
U-235 and Pu-239 are alpha emitters and alphas have poor penetration. Most of the radiation will be self-absorbed by the fissile material and what little escapes will be stopped by the surrounding material in the device. An intact nuclear weapon is not a radiation hazard.

>>31355446

In order for a nuclear weapon to properly detonate the fissile material must be able to be formed into what is known as a critical mass.

A critical mass is lump of fissile material that when triggered by a neutron initiator undergoes a chain of fission reactions that consumes a significant proportion fissile nuclei before the mass blows itself apart.

The proportion of fissile nuclei that fission before the mass explodes is a mostly a function of its geometry and density (which depend on the initial mass of fissile material prior to being explosively compressed into a critical mass.)
This means that a functional nuclear weapon must have a minimum quantity of fissile material or the device will blow itself apart without much fission occurring (one way a fizzle detonation can occur). It it possible to reduce the size and weight of a device using neutron reflecting material to catch neutrons that would otherwise escape the critical mass and be wasted, but this can only be taken so far. The minimum possible size for a nuclear weapon and how to build it are a closely guarded secret. But judging from what the US has deployed, you can't make a nuke smaller than a heavy backpack (~50kg) or an artillery shell.

You will never have nuclear hand-grenades.

>>31363722
Doubtful, they know 4chan is mostly filled with fuckwits.

>>31355446
>hurr durr what is critical mass

>>31355446
Critical mass is a problem. You need 2 subcritical loads and add them together to achieve a nuke-type explosion.

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>>31355553
>Nuclear material is incredibly expensive and incredibly time consuming to produce for weapons.

Yeah...in 1942.

There have been some developments in this area since then. It's now very easy to produce huge quantities of nuclear material if you have the industrial capacity for it, which the USA does.

Consequently, we have a huge amount of this material just sitting around in storage.

Where did you think our 40,000 warheads during the cold war came from, exactly?

>Nuclear weapons require very precise engineering to work properly.
>Nuclear weapons are radioactive, which makes them hazardous to carry, and spreads radiation where they are used as well.

These concerns are trivial if you're already set up to handle this stuff, which we have been for more than half a century.

>>31364646
Well consider OP's request
>carry 9mm nukes to use against Muhammad's panzer

Anything so radioactive so close to one's body is a concern.

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By the way, you guys banging on about critical mass are missing one important detail: the size of the critical mass changes depending on how you engineer the warhead.

The critical mass of the trinity bomb was much larger than what you find in, for example, a Minuteman missile, because these bombs were constructed differently. Modern warheads use a variety of engineering tricks in combination to achieve a very small size.

There's no reason to doubt that they'll get even smaller in the future as we learn more and discover new methods and materials for bomb construction.

Yes, it'll probably be a very long time before we can make ones the size of pistol rounds, but it's not as if a nuke needs to be gigantic. We've already made some pretty small ones in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W48

>The W48 was an American nuclear artillery shell, capable of being fired from any standard 155 mm (6.1 inch) howitzer, e.g. the M114, M198 or M109. It was manufactured starting in 1963, and all units were retired in 1992.

>The W48 was 6.1 inches (155 mm) in diameter and 33.3 inches long. It came in two models, Mod 0 and Mod 1, which are reported to have weighed 118 and 128 pounds respectively. It had an explosive yield equivalent to 72 tons of TNT (0.072 kiloton), which is very small for a nuclear weapon.[1][2]

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>>31364670
>Anything so radioactive so close to one's body is a concern.

Not really. The actual nuclear material part of the bomb is not particularly radioactive or unsafe if handled properly, e.g., not sticking it in your mouth.

If you could build a bomb the size of a 9mm round, the amount of material inside of it would have to be vanishingly small.

Because there's no such things as nukes you stupid faggot

>>31364744
But to create a nuke-type explosion, it would have to be extremely violent.

Personally, I'd just stick some beta-active material in a hollow point so that it stays in, that fucks you up. or alpha, I think one of them is that.

>>31364838
Alpha is the weakest, shit air can insulate you from it if there's enough between you and it.

You're thinking gamma rays.

But that isn't quick, it's not even a slow death, you'd die of an infected wound faster.

>>31364676
damn i hope you are right

But I really can't believe that methods are just going to get better without knowing a particular method for improvement. I guess you could increase temperature and pressure massively to stimulate the reaction, but idk if it is practical to do that within a bullet.

>>31364895
No, alpha, if outside the body, doesn't do shit. But INSIDE, it is harmful

>For example, there is an element called americium-241 which gives off alpha radiation. This radiation can be very harmful if it is inside someone's body because it can change the DNA in the cells. But it is not harmful when it is outside of the body because alpha radiation does not travel through the outside layers of the skin very well.

>>31364925
>increase pressure and temperature
Bullets already do that, don't they? That'd be great.

>>31364646
There is a difference between fissile material for nuclear power plants and fissile material for nuclear weapons.

>>31364676
The W48 also weighed around 100 pounds.

>>31365033
Yeah, but I think that you'd have to increase pressure and temperature massively. Also not sure about shape and stuff. Like it is best to have sphere at the end stage, but that mandates that you have some portions of a sphere that will join on impact. I guess you could have one half of the Uranium sphere towards the back and then upon impact it would go forwards inside of the bullet and become a sphere with the other half. Problem with that seems to be that it would be moving real fast and idk going supercritical sounds like it might take a little while to complete. Then again, velocity is a good thing I think for causing criticality? Maybe somehow the bullet could open up the front and expel the supercritical uranium ball? Would an initial pump of radiation while still in the gun perhaps keep the halves on the upper end of subcritical?

Honestly I have no idea how this stuff works

>>31364925

It's painfully obvious that you know next to nothing about this subject. However, I have the cure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVhQOhxb1Mc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnW7DxsJth0

That should get you started on a basic level. Just google everything else you're interested in.

>>31365097
>There is a difference between fissile material for nuclear power plants and fissile material for nuclear weapons.

What are you trying to get at with this?

Do you think that the United States does not have the ability to make huge amounts of nuclear material very easily, and that it doesn't have huge amounts already in storage?

Because, it does. It has them right inside that building I posted a picture of. It's part of the Y12 complex, a facility that focuses exclusively on nuclear weapons production, maintenance, and design.

>The W48 also weighed around 100 pounds.

Pretty great for something designed in the 50's and built in the 60's.

Just imagine what we can build now, or what we'll be able to build in the future.

>>31355446
>Than why not make mini nukes to use on armour.
You need material with tiny critical mass. Those materials can be produced in labs only and their cost is astronomical. Before you put it in bullet NASA will take it away for space nuclear engine.

>>31365323
>You need material with tiny critical mass.

This is not how critical mass works.

Critical mass just means how much material you need to cause a reliable chain reaction. Most nuclear material is wasted in the explosion, with only a tiny part actually contributing to the reaction. But you need all of that wasted material around the good bits to keep the good bits together.

Critical mass has been reduced in size over time by the invention of new methods for keeping the mass together longer during the reaction, thus ensuring that less material is wasted, which means you don't need quite so much of it.

It really doesn't have that much to do with the material itself (only a few elements are actually capable of creating a nuclear explosion to begin with). It's what you do with it that matters.

It's like the difference between a camp fire and a wood-fired stove. The camp fire is less efficient for cooking because you waste a lot of material just burning it up and watching it sail away as smoke and heat. A wood-fired stove contains the energy and directs it to what you're cooking, so you need less wood to get the same result.

>>31365218
>Just google everything else you're interested in.

thanks man, looks like some nice videos.

>>31365535

You're welcome.

The lecturer guy is pretty cool. I wish he had some more videos up. He's really easy to listen to and he explains everything in a pretty idiot-proof way.

This subject is a lot less complex than most people think it is, you just have to understand the fundamentals before you can grasp how the rest of it works.

>>31361321
Go home /pol/

>>31365218
In comparison the W54 warhead weighed half as much. While larger than the W48, the W54 used half as much plutonium.

The main problem with nuclear micro-munitions is the greater cost to manufacture combined with extra precautions needed for handling and transport combined with the inherent user risk. Conventional munitions work just well at killing armor and can actually be used at close range.

>>31365770
>Conventional munitions work just well at killing armor and can actually be used at close range.

Yep.

You don't need a nuclear weapon to kill a tank. You just need to chuck a small piece of tungsten at them really fast.