No, as I said initially, they aren’t as good as they thought..

Sure they are. Just not in YOUR opinion because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Small nuclear explosions are more threat to humans than physical targets. ..

Really? You might take another look at what was left of Hiroshima after they dropped the bomb.

A nuclear weapon consists of very fragile components that while they might resist a high g launch from an artillery piece are not that good at resisting impacts against solid granite. ..

Talk about your howlers. “While it can survive upwards of 20,000Gs it is very fragile.”

And under mountains of solid granite is a common place for the targets they are after to be placed..

Sandia labs tested the concept back in the 80s by firing RVs into granite mountains in preperation for a penetrating RV for the Pershing 2. And Mach 8 is a HELL of a lot more taxing than a drop from a bomber. But I’m sure you’re much smarter than them or else the test results MUST have been falsified right?

During the cold war the only interest in small nukes other than as portable weapons for spec ops was in enhanced radiation weapons or because the diameter of the shell wasn’t large enough for anything more powerful…

Wrong again. The W33 had a 40kt yeild (about three Hiroshimas) and it was in an 8″ diameter artillery shell.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Mk33.jpg

The W48 had a 72 ton yield in a 6″ artillery shell and before you say “well that’s hardly enough to bother with” it’s about 150 times the boom power of a 5000lb GBU-28 which has less than a thousand pounds of explosives in it.

Unless you can bury the charge inside the target before it explodes then you need a very powerful charge. The fragility of nuke warheads means that burying it deeply isn’t very likely. …

According to Garry’s laws of physics huh? According to the laws the rest of us use the only way you’d get more stress than an artillery shell is if you decelerated in less distance than the length of the barrel. But then since we’re talking about a bomb dropped from an aircraft it wouldn’t even have to be that. (Bomb impact velocity is far less than the muzzle velocity of a shell).

Small nukes put out pretty much similar practical radiation to big nukes. In fact in practical terms they actually are more of a problem as there are fission and fusion weapons… fission is Uraniaium and Plutonium, while Fusion is hyrdogen. …

Where to start. Thermonuclear weapons don’t fuse hydrogen they fuse lithium6. And thermonuclear weapons use tampers made of guess what- uranium. And there isn’t a fusion weapon on the planet that doesn’t have a fission trigger. In fact the majority of your small bombs are simply the triggers of the larger ones or variants of them.

Fission is dirty and causes a lot of radiation. In much larger weapons the fireball can be larger than the dangerous (note the dangerous radiation radius is much larger than the lethal radiation radius) radiation radius. In effect to get enough radiation to kill you you have to be inside the fireball and would be killed by that anyway….

You’ll want to explain that to all the people who died from radiation exposure from open air testing in Nevada and the two drops in Japan. They didn’t die from prompt radiation but they DID die from the radiation. Actually some did die in Japan from a lethal dose of radiation after they’d survived the fireball. Some in hours, some days, some weeks.

Even worse this weapon had to be a ground burst so the amount of irradiated vapourised material would be large.

Actually the theory was to explode it UNDER ground not ON the ground but they’d have been lucky to contain it in dirt, let alone reinforced concrete or rock. (The GBU-28 is good for about 120feet in dirt.)

But as I have said penetrating granite is a bit like penetrating steel armour. 400m of steel armour can’t be penetrated by small nukes.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much ignorance in two sentences before.

1. Granite is NOT like “steel armor”. If it was they’d be using granite for tanks not tank armor.

2. What in God’s name makes you think they’d need to penetrate through 400 meters of ANYTHING? The idea is to couple the shock to the ground vs letting it disipate in the air. Do some research (there’s that dreaded word) on underground and underwater testing and you’ll see why that notion seems so assinine.