Talk:Suitcase nuclear device

message: This article should mention that, even if any such Soviet-era "suitcase nukes" had fallen into the wrong hands, the fact remains that the fissile cores would have decayed into duds years ago. They'd only be valuable as crappy "dirty bombs" (and there are so many better substances to use than uranium or plutonium) or for the fissile material inside, and that itself would only be worth anything to people who already have nuclear weapons programs.
*Why assume that the plutonium or uranium would have decayed enough to be useless in a weapon? Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, so if the bombs were made even as early as the 1970s (which is, I believe, around when the USSR would have been able to miniaturize their arsenal to that degree), it would still have some 99.92% of its original plutonium, would it not? I'm not a physicist but I'm not sure why that amount of time would render them completely duds. I'd be more worried about the chemical explosive degrading than I would the cores. The US replaces its cores sooner than that but that is because they set the threshhold very high, of course. I'm betting that most weapons made in the 1970s would still detonate today. And since the Soviet weapons could have been made as late as the end of the 1980s, that's even more time. Anyway, I'd want to see an official source saying such a thing before I'd want it on this page. Uranium-235 has a half-life of some 700 million years, according to our page on it. --Fastfission 02:08, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Suitcase nuke

message: I removed the following link  about bin Laden purchasing suitcase nukes for two reasons: 1. the source is unbashedly partisan and 2. many of the claims are pretty hard to swallow and are not, in my mind, accepted as being plausible by society at large (that OBL had hundreds of ex-Soviet nuclear physicists working in Afghanistan with tons of sophisticated enrichment equipment -- and where did they all disappear to? why didn't we find mountains of evidence of this? and if OBL has had suitcase nukes since the early '90s, why hasn't he used them yet? hasn't he had ample opportunity, what with the USA invading Afghanistan in 2002? It doesn't add up). If you can find a better source for this, that would be fine, but as it stands, it's the equivalent of linking to tabloids. --Fastfission 04:35, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Mmm, so one BBC documentary of questionable veracity about the difficulties of infrastructure in various eastern bloc countries (unguarded, but what was in them?), and suddenly a line about the difficulties in purchasing something like nuclear weapons on the blackmarket becomes "total bollocks"? I don't think so... --Fastfission 01:34, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why I removed the link about OBL and suitcase nukes 

message: You can make bombs that won't decay for a long time
you can use an artificial element that was created in a partical accelerator or something
I dont't really see much point in a suitcase bomb
you can put a bomb in the trunk of a car or in the back of a van
Dudtz 7/25/05 4:15 EST
:Mmm, what an insightful comment! --Fastfission 01:26, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Decay 

message: It my personal opinion that authors of this report were trying to hide the truth for some reason. They did not say a word about GRU defector Lunev, although they knew very well about his existence (he gave a testimony to US Congress, as far as I know). Biophys 03:51, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Report from Monterey Institute

message: Wasn't there an episode of The Cook Report on which Roger Cook (journalist) successfully bought a Russian suitcase nuke from a shady arms dealer? 93.96.236.8 (talk) 22:18, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: The Cook Report

message: Due to ongoing long term persistent vandalism by the anonymous editor behind http://wtcdemolition.blogspot.com/ and http://covertoperations.blogspot.com/ ("The WTC was nuked on 9/11"), the articles :W54, :David Worby, :Suitcase nuke, and :Health effects arising from the September 11 attacks have been permanently semiprotected.  Only logged in editors with Wikipedia accounts who have been autoconfirmed (are at least 4 days old) can edit the articles from now.  Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 21:23, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article permanently semiprotected 

message: I'm not sure why this guy keeps popping up all over Wikipedia, but Lunev is a fringe source with many theories, sometimes bordering on the bizarre, about what the Soviet Union was up to after he defected.  I'm not sure his theory here should be taking up half of this page.  I also think we need a more precise definition of what kind of weapons are entailed here.
Also, I removed the popular culture section as trivia, but perhaps there should be further discussion of that -- if a "suitcase nuke" is a popular culture term itself (rather than a precise category) should we restore that section? csloat (talk) 23:09, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: He didn't bother to mention Lunev because he wanted people to take him seriously.  Lunev is simply not a credible source and he was probably well aware of that. csloat (talk) 03:34, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

text: BTW, I have read a number of Lunev's interviews, he hardly sounds like a lunatic fringe crackpot. VЄСRUМВА  ♪  03:25, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that's what the FBI considers him.  Which of his statements did you find non-fringy, his comment that the Soviets hid nuclear weapons in Virginia or his claim that the Chinese Red Army was dressing like Mexican immigrants in order to take over Texas? csloat (talk) 03:34, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

text: OK, I have included in the article what exactly Lunev said and what exactly FBI said.Biophys (talk) 14:55, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

text: He said these things in congressional testimony; you should know since you added this material yourself (at least regarding nukes in the US) to the nuclear terrorism page, violating consensus and making false statements in your edit summaries.  I'll look up the thing about Chinese dressing up as Mexicans if you really care.  The FBI doesn't say things like "fringe crackpot"; those were Vecrumba's words.  What the FBI said was that he "exaggerated things" and that he was "discredited."  Again, you already know this, since you are adding this material to another page against consensus.  I'm satisfied that there's consensus to keep the Lunev material on this page so I won't remove it further other than to insist that we stick to what the sources actually say.  If you're going to add the stuff about the Soviets issuing contradictory statements, please indicate where in the source it says that.  And who considers the statements contradictory.  It is editorializing to call statements contradictory without a source clearly stating that; don't tell me you deduced it from the source.  Finally, I re-removed the pop culture trivia section as per wikipedia policy.  If a "suitcase nuke" is a pop culture category ratehr than a specific kind of weapon, we can restore the section, but we should rewrite the article accordingly as well. csloat (talk) 00:15, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Undue weight to Lunev section? 

message: There are several grammatical errors in the last paragraph.
"suitcase nukes might be already deployed by the GRU operatives at the US soil . . ." etc.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.186.224.74 (talk) 18:37, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Grammar

message: This article is one of a  number selected for the early stage of the trial of the Wikipedia:Pending Changes system on the English language Wikipedia. All the articles listed at Wikipedia:Pending changes/Queue   are being considered for level 1 pending changes protection.
The following request appears on that page:
Comments on the suitability of theis page for "Pending changes"  would be appreciated.
Please update the Queue page as appropriate.
Note that I am not involved in this project any much more than any other editor, just posting these notes since it is quite a big change, potentially
Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 00:13, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Pending changes

message: Hi all. I've gone ahead and merged content in from Pocket nuke, as there was very little there that wasn't already here and maintaining two articles on substantially the same subject would be a waste of time. Pocket nuke is now a redirect here and any non-duplicate material has been merged over. I started to clean up the resulting article, but more eyes is always helpful. Cheers. Zachlipton (talk) 06:27, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge from [[Pocket nuke]] 

message: Hello,
Nobody would seriously consider going through this article or any of the others concerning nuclear devices, and changing the parts showing "nuclear device" to  nuke. 
"Nuclear terrorism refers to an act of terrorism in which a person or persons belonging to a terrorist organisation detonates a nuke"
"Nuclear terrorism could include:
Acquiring or fabricating a nuke" - Nuking terrorism, Antrangelos (talk) 23:11, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Could you clarify the last two sentences?... Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 01:01, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  On the changing of title to >Suitcase nuclear device 

message: Something on the physics-based limits should be in the article, i.e. on critical masses and what they mean for such a device, how you can (and can't) shape these bombs so that they still work, etc. -- 89.182.88.213 (talk) 16:39, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Physics? 

message: Isn't the "the theoretical minimum mass of a Plutonium-239 fission warhead being estimated at close to 15 kg" just the weight of the P-239, excluding the not-inconsiderable weight of the apparatus?203.80.61.102 (talk) 01:37, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minimum size