WI:Nuclear Bullet/Shell/Rocket

It is, apparently, Cf-252 that has the ridiculously low critical mass, on the order of a few grams, not Cf-251.

The trouble with the concept, as well as cost, is decay. The fissile material has a half-life of just 2.6 years, so you can't stockpile them. And the decay heat would gradually cook off the propellant in the bullet, so the magazine would need cooling. Oh, and Cf-252 has a higher than ideal spontaneous fission rate for nuclear weapons.

Cf-252 would probably stretch to a nuclear mortar shell or hand grenade, though. And with a longer half-life (900 years) it would probably remain effective long enough to get from the plant to the battlefield.

There's an article here claiming that the USSR tested a californium bullet, but decided against employment. Pravda, so make of it what you will. Some discussion of the physics here.

I really can't see the practical applications of such a weapon, though. Maybe special operations forces - I can see dropping a few hundred tons on theatre nuclear weapons being useful - but production, stockpiling and cost would be major issues. They'd pretty much have to be built for a specific job, given the rate of decay.
 
There is a gun that fires bullets with uranium

The GAU-8 Avenger from A-10 ground combat aircraft.
it fires 30 mm caliber PGU-14/B Armor-piercing shell
That bullet got a enrich uranium core, because it mass, density and hardness, it can penetrate the armor.
A very bad side effect is that target get contaminated with radioactive uranium.

30mm_DU_slug.jpg

PGU-14/B Armor-piercing uranium core
 
More heavy metal toxicity from burnt uranium dust than radioactivity, really; and in any case those and fin rounds- APFSDSDU- use depleted uranium, the leftovers from the refining process after the U-235 has been extracted; it's less 'nuclear' than the raw ore.

The only use for nuclear explosive small arms or autocannon rounds I can spot is if something science fictional happens in the field of armour; if the technical improvements that give rise to OGREs and Bolos actually prove out- and if so, how?- and between that and active defence, we end up with targets essentially invulnerable to anything in their own class.

Extreme tactical firepower, in that situation, maybe, but again pure science fiction unlikely to occur in the real world. Which is just as well, considering places that have been fought through tend not to be improved by it and how much nuclear weapons, even baby ones, tear up the landscape.
 
There is a gun that fires bullets with uranium

The GAU-8 Avenger from A-10 ground combat aircraft.
it fires 30 mm caliber PGU-14/B Armor-piercing shell
That bullet got a enrich uranium core, because it mass, density and hardness, it can penetrate the armor.
A very bad side effect is that target get contaminated with radioactive uranium.

30mm_DU_slug.jpg

PGU-14/B Armor-piercing uranium core

Umm.. no.

Its not "enriched" uranium but depleted uranium, as the directive opposite of enriched.
The radioactivity of depleted uranium (almost pure U-238) is neglectable. However, uranium is a quite toxic heavy metal in the chemical sense, but "radioactivity" is a far more mysteriously threatening thing than just "heavy metal poisoning".

Edit: ninja'ed.
 
Maybe someone does a timeline where instead of being obsessed with building a bigger bomb, Edward Teller wants to build more compact and usable devices?
 
Maybe someone does a timeline where instead of being obsessed with building a bigger bomb, Edward Teller wants to build more compact and usable devices?

He did want to build more compact and usable devices.

Edward Teller basically wanted to build every possible kind of nuclear device at some point in his career. From gigaton-range planet-smashers to third-generation tailored-effects bombs to sub-kiloton mini-nukes, you name it, he wanted to build it.
 
how effective would the Davy Crockets be if air deployed? Mounted on skyraiders or other ground attack planes of that era?
 
how effective would the Davy Crockets be if air deployed? Mounted on skyraiders or other ground attack planes of that era?

I think at that point you're better off going with something with a bit more bang - i.e., a tactical nuke of the types they did deploy.
 
I think at that point you're better off going with something with a bit more bang - i.e., a tactical nuke of the types they did deploy.

So using them like a nuclear tiny Tim's would not be that effective? I just see i my head four Skyraiders diving down on a brigade of Soviet tanks crossing into west Germany and then BAM!.
 
So using them like a nuclear tiny Tim's would not be that effective? I just see i my head four Skyraiders diving down on a brigade of Soviet tanks crossing into west Germany and then BAM!.
Sure. But they'd do it by leaving three of the Skyraiders at home and use a single Mk-7 device.
 
Careful, don't inflate the firing platform too much or we're going to get back to OTL. W23 nuclear shells for the Iowa, anyone? :D
 
So using them like a nuclear tiny Tim's would not be that effective? I just see i my head four Skyraiders diving down on a brigade of Soviet tanks crossing into west Germany and then BAM!.

Sure. But they'd do it by leaving three of the Skyraiders at home and use a single Mk-7 device.

What RLBH said.

Careful, don't inflate the firing platform too much or we're going to get back to OTL. W23 nuclear shells for the Iowa, anyone? :D

I still want to see a nuclear-powered battleship firing W23 shells. I figure somebody in the Navy must have designed one at some point, just as a paper exercise, but I've never been able to find it.
 
What RLBH said.



I still want to see a nuclear-powered battleship firing W23 shells. I figure somebody in the Navy must have designed one at some point, just as a paper exercise, but I've never been able to find it.

The Iowa wasn't nuclear-powered, but had W23 shells for some years. 50% is still something.
 

trurle

Banned
The practical solution for "nuclear bullet" is so-called "pure fusion warhead". Fusion does not have a critical mass. Just parametric trade-off between operation pressure and warhead size.
Currently, DARPA research antimatter-triggered fusion warhead. Idea is to have a tiny hollow ball of Lithium-Tritide with ~1 milligram speck of frozen anti-hydrogen suspended in the center. The ball is coated with conventional explosive, and wrapped in magnetic containment system and refrigerator. Upon conventional explosive detonation, the LiT compresses around anti-hydrogen, and ignited by it.
This weapon is scalable to bullet size (from physical, but not engineering perspective). With current antimatter containment tech, the size may be realistically something like 40mm grenade. Of course, nobody yet produced required 1 milligram of antimatter.:D. The yield of 40mm version is ~100 tons, 40 tons of antimatter and 60 tons of fusion. So it is a "fusion grenade" rather than "fusion bullet"

Alternatively, to miniaturize, it is theoretically possible to ignite fusion bead without antimatter, heating compressed LiT bead with lasers pumped by piezoluminiscent crystals, which are powered by the force of bullet impact. It will make a premier anti-materiel weapon, with 3mm bead exploding like heavy mortar shell (20kg of TNT equivalent). But engineering of this design will require at least a perfectly mastered nanotech, because initial energy is small compared to to anti-matter detonated design (kilojoules compared to hundred gigajoules). If you want even more complication, attach heavy-metal X-ray laser rod to the front, and you will get anti-armor weapon. Piercing ~1m of armor without physically penetrating.
 
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