Like the title says, are they or any part of them radioactive before they go off? if the core is exposed isn't radiation leaking out or am i wrong?

 

No, they are not... the do have to be handled carefully... Ask the Airforce to count them...

 

i was watching broken arrow shitty movie by the way and they said the nukes had exposed cores and that it was radioactive i know its a movie but we got in a debate about it.

 

OK, yes, the core, the fissionable material IS radioactive, but, there rilly isn't a whole lot of it in a nuke. A little goes a LOOOOOOOOOOONG way. So, if someone WERE to blow one up, without setting it of it would disperse radioactive material, but it would only disperse as far as whatever blow-uppable material they used could send it. Generally, not far enough to do any real harm, since it would basically be radioactive dust from particles, not from a thermo-nuclear detonation where the energy transfer is multiplied by a factor of roughly 10 to the 5th power (crude math, but, for the target audience, usable). MUCH BIGGER FIREBALL, much BIGGER dispersal pattern (depending on teh prevailiing winds and teh jet-stream, of course), much hhigher casualty rate. With a non-nuclear detonation you could basically clean up the radioactive articles with a very large vacuum-cleaner. No so much, with option #2.

 

Core is radioactive but since it's seal in the bomb ur okay. Until teh bomb goes boom.

 

ok i knew the bomb itself was not radio active but i argued that the core was

 

An atomic bomb has a radioactive core. If something is radioactive, it is unstable and releasing energy. So I would guess that the core is releasing very small amounts of energy. A conventional explosion creates a chain reactive where atoms are split and there is a large amount of radioactive energy released. Basically you have a bunch of stuff that wants to decay into more stable stuff. This occurs naturally according to probability. Obviously you want to minimize the amount of energy that is released naturally. The trigger creates a chain reaction where all of the stuff decays at once and large amounts of radiation is released.

This website explains some of it: http://www.worsleyschool.net/science...lear/bomb.html

 

See: Dirty Bomb

Though an RDD (radiological dispersal device) would be designed to disperse radioactive material over a large area, a bomb that uses conventional explosives would likely have more immediate lethal effect than the radioactive material. At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for one year, the radiation exposure would be "fairly high", but not fatal.

I got lazy and just copied **** from wiki, but yeah, what he ^^^ said.

 

Yeah, I sadi that, too, but I used, like, 1/5th the words to do it.

 

yeah, my ^^^'s dont stretch far enough. pointing at you chief.