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You mentioned that a un-maintained nuclear bomb would still go off, but would cause little damage. Please explain. Is it that the detonator goes off but the nuclear portion doesn't blow? Or that because some of the detonators don't go, due to not being maintained, you don't get the proper nuclear chain reaction?

At the risk of oversimplifying, the key in a fission nuclear weapon is to slam the fissile components together in a way that causes a chain reaction sufficient to induce most of the core to undergo fission as completely as possible.

The catch is that the chain reaction has to occur pretty much simultaneously throughout the entire core in order to get the biggest "boom", because if any one portion of the core undergoes the chain reaction before the rest of the core (even by a few microseconds), that one portion releases enough energy to blow apart the rest of the core and prevents the bulk of it from reacting fully (or at all), and you get a "fizzle" -- a "pop" when you wanted a "*BOOM*".

Depending on how badly it misfired, you'd get an explosion with the force of anywhere from a hand grenade to a truck bomb, and uranium or plutonium splattered around the immediate vicinity making for a messy cleanup, but nothing like what most folks would consider a nuclear explosion.

From what I know and not from action novels or sci-fi shows the smallest nuclear fission device ever made is about the size of a softball with an approximate ONE thousand pound TNT equivalent yield.
As far as those missing Russian backpacks being for real I very much think so. They were carried as a two part arraingement, each one was roughly 90 lbs, I forget the yield but it may have been up around 10k in yield. As far as what makes a bomb "smart" is whether it completes its fission cycle and detonates or fizzles and becomes a "dirty" bomb with just the conventional HE spreading the isotopes.
Does AQ have backpack nukes? I think they do,when is the best time to use them? when they think it would totally paralize, terrorize and absolutely hurt us. My thoughts would be they may try to smuggle in a trojan horse that appears to be a nuclear device (shipping containers full of lead sheating and dirty bombs) but are not the true device of terror which would be biologicals such as smallpox, all it would take is 100 Jhihadists injected with smallpox traveling across the country by bus, train and air to effectively cripple the country by contaminating everyone they come into contact with.

How do we battle all this? how do we treat a gangenous part of a body? negotiate with it? feel sorry for it? Myself I think the government should ban any religous practice involving the Koran in the US, its a terrorists religon.If it means a holy war then so be it, and I think there should be an American made neutron bomb placed in a secure bunker right in the middle of Mecca, big enough to kill every Muslim or living being in a 5 mile radius. It would not destroy the rekigous site and if we were attacked again we would detonate it again.