Most of these devices fall into two categories:
- very small
- prolly won't work
The US stuff, as a rule just works... but we have opted largely for very accurate, comparatively very small warheads. Most of ours fall somewhere in the 0.05-0.1MT range, because really... that is enough so long as you actually hit your target.
The Soviets on the other hand lacked the technological capabilities of the Americans (this is why the Star Wars projects was effective, even though everyone know it wasn't feasible at that time... the Soviets knew that when Americans build ****, it works... so they figured we knew a hell of a lot they didn't) so they opted for very large (20-50MT) warheads on rather inaccurate missiles. The idea being that a single 50MT nuke in Kansas would knock out communications across the US. And you can be many, many miles off target and still get the job done with cities.
Now to the stuff that prolly won't work. After the fall of the iron curtain we got a look at what the Soviets actually had. Suffice to say much of our electronic warfare technology of the time would have been totally useless as their stuff wasn't sophisticated enough to attack with it. Their submarines had ok guidance, but most of their ground based stuff was almost as bad as just pointing the rocket in what they felt to be the right direction. Granted this is more or less the basics of ballistics... but usually some modeling is done. You have to figure... of the non-western nations, their system has got to be one of the best... and the American auditors were reporting that they'd be amazed if half the stuff worked... add in over 15 years of disrepair and it doesn't look good.
Other countries with nukes like India and Pakistan, South Africa, Israel, have essentially no delivery systems and their devices are also most likely in less than stellar states of repair. (especially since the US seems to have regretted giving Israel devices and subsequently dropped support).
"burning uranium" is uranium engaged in a fission reaction, not just on fire... so you would not get any burning uranium from a dirty nuke. Dirty nukes are really hyped up, their actual threat, while worse than a regular bomb is not really that bad. The device would need to vaporize the uranium as it isn't absorbed through the skin, nor are its alpha particles. The contaminated area would merely need to be washed down with water, like was done in Hiroshima. Plutonium also poses little risk outside of the body. Don't get me wrong, exposure isn't great... (how many years did it take radiation pioneers to die after doing things like taking pictures of their hand by placing it on a piece of paper and holding a lump of uranium over it?)
A lot of cities have similar fines... rumor has it Chico, California was the first. The fine is for use of a nuclear device, etc... the idea is to prevent companies from developing nuclear devices by/with the universities.
cheers,
catch
