Special Bulletin: Difference between revisions

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Thus begins this 1983 [[Made for TV]] movie about a group of people who have allegedly placed a home-made nuclear bomb on a boat in Charleston, South Carolina harbor. They want to make a stand against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and demand a beginning to the end of such weaponry. Unless they receive some 400 trigger devices (which would make it impossible for the U.S. to detonate the nuclear weapons requiring those triggers) which they will then dump into Charleston Harbor, they will detonate their own weapon. The U.S. has 48 hours to comply.

 

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* [[A Nuclear Error]]: Averted in that the film is quite accurate about showing the effects of a 10-kiloton nuclear groundburst at that location.

** But played entirely straight in the entire 'bomb detonation' denouement. In real life, as soon as the NEST team had physical control of the bomb site for any period of time the problem just de-escalated from 'Will we lose the city of Charleston?' to 'Will we lose the tugboat?' Nuclear bombs don't work unless the conventional explosive elements detonate with ''exact'' symmetry, literally to the nanosecond. Regardless of the level of anti-tamper technology built into the detonator, so much as moving one of the explosive blocks marginally out of position would turn the atomic warhead into a mere 'dirty bomb', a conventional explosion that scattered plutonium dust into the atmosphere. Still nothing you'd want to be in the immediate vicinity of, but no real hazard outside that.