Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaptain K
Those "suitcase" nukes were also terribly finicky. They were not "just set it and forget it" weapons. They needed almost constant fiddling by highly trained techs to work!
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True; the reason being...they had polonium 210 'triggers' which have a half life of only 138 days, meaning the 'triggers' had to be replaced every 6 months or so. (I think the polonium had to be combined with berrylium first to get the neccesary neutron initiation).
So a loose "Samsonite" Nuke wouldn't 'last long' unless a source of polonium was available.
I suspect that the recent 'contamination' death of Litvinenko in Britain had something to do with smuggling Polonium to use as a trigger .....You can bet the al Quada types are looking for 'em.
G^2