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Iran could develop nuclear suicide bomb vests, claims JD Vance
(www.9news.com.au)
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this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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There is a minimum-amount of fission-fuel required, AND there is a minimum-amount of conventional-explosives required to compress the fission-fuel until it goes supercritical.
That detonator isn't going to be small-enough to hide in a vest.
Absolute disinformation.
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JD should stick to fucking couches, not nuclear physics.
I really wonder what happened when making that couch. The left one being on piece and then the right one having a seam between the bottom and the "pillow". Thinking it's either AI or some home project that didn't pan out as planned.
I was thinking maybe it's a sectional missing a section, with the part on the left being a sticky-outy bit for your legs that doesn't have a back, and the part on the right expecting another piece on the side towards the camera.
Or AI.
It is stupid for even more reasons than that. I've thought about it back when North Korea had pretend nuclear suicide bombers march on their military parade.
Even if somehow they manage to cram one in a backpack that is carriable by a person, there is no advantage whatsoever given the blast radius. You will have to use a vehicle of sorts to get near the enemy and more importantly away from your friendlies anyway. Whatever distance you can cover on foot afterwards won't make much of a difference. Might as well make it vehicle borne.
I mean, yeah, the Davie Crockett could fit in a back pack, a really big back pack
I mean, the W54 was small enough to be carried by a person and I don't think anyone wants even a 1kt device going off near them. So it's within the realm of possibility even if it does strain credulity as an actual goal Iran was working toward (let alone a solid justification for this bullshit).
Edit: the W54 weighed 51lb (23 kg).
That wouldn't be a suicide vest, though; it'd be a suicide fat suit.
He’s talking about a dirty bomb. And, technically, that is quite possible and doable by the Iranians.
It’s a stupid assertion, yes; but the engineering is plausible.
Do you actually need conventional explosives? I had the impression all they do is reliably stick the big hunks of radioactive material together in a big bomb that needs to be delivered at high speeds and detonate automatically. Wouldn't it be enough to quickly shove a cylinder into a bigger core, perhaps with a motor or even a tensioned spring?
That of course doesn't waive the issue of the amount of fissile material, or the fact it needs to be all put together (you can't spread it around a vest)
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.
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