Suitcase Nuke - Suitcase Nuclear Weapons

Suitcase Nuclear Weapons

The Center for Defense Information (CDI) claims that a detailed training replica—with dummy explosives and no fissionable material—was routinely concealed inside a briefcase and hand-carried on domestic airline flights in the early 1980s.

While the explosive power of the W54—up to an equivalent of 6 kiloton of TNT (though the more common yield was much lower)—is not much by the normal standards of a nuclear weapon (the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were around 16 to 21 kilotons each), their value lies in their ability to be easily smuggled across borders, transported by means widely available, and placed as close to the target as possible.

Read more about this topic:  Suitcase Nuke

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