"Therefore, I will tell you,. that you CANNOT use old, consumer-grade parts, like out of a tv or vcr, to make up the firing devices for the implosion assy. We are talking about SUB-MICROSECOND timing, here, and your Solid-state devices, like SCR's, are WAY slower than that."
Never suggested popping the plutonium into the vcr or the microwave. I have several solid state devices within arms reach that are faster than required. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. The processor in the computer I am on right now operates at a frequency 2400 times that. That is just one example.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. Light will travel 11,784,960,000 inches in one second, or 11,784.96 inches in one microsecond, or 11.785 inches in one nanosecond. So, given that you have a carrier of consistent composition, say, copper wire (the propagation of the charge will not be at quite the speed of light, but wiil approach it) you can expect the charges to arrive at all the destination points within the same nanosecond as long as the carriers are close to the same length (within 11.785 inches if copper were an ideal carrier).
Furthermore, you can test your harness ahead of time to insure that it will deliver charges within a particular time span. You can also use redundancy to cover your bets. All that has to happen is that the charges have to arrive within a particular microsecond to insure the integrity of the spherical compression wave that shatters the initiator and compresses the plutonium. It does not matter if the electrical charges to the conventional explosives took 10 nanoseconds, 500 nanoseconds or 3 hours to get there. So you don't even need the 2.4 GHz processor except to test your harness. I don't think it requires thousands of volts at hundreds of amps to detonate conventional explosives such as were used in "Fat Man" but even if it did, is that really that hard? No.
"BTW--if you know as much about nukes as you say, then, you will know that the term 'dirty bomb' is NOT the correct term for a device that only spreads fallout, and no nuclear yield-- the term is Radiological dispersal device, or RDD. The term "dirty bomb" used to be applied, to a hydrogen bomb, which had a jacket of depleted uranium attached to the secondary, to increase the yield, while, at the same time, GREATLY increasing the radiological emissions,IE, fallout, and hence, the term 'dirty bomb'. a CLEAN bomb, was one that had an inert shell, like lead, or aluminum, for this outer casing, and did not produce nearly as much fallout as the 'dirty' one."
Yes, but the current use is any conventional explosive device used to spread radioactive materials. For convenience I appropriated it to describe a botched plutonium explosion where the plutonium gets blown apart before fissioning. But I concede your point.
Now, I will ADMIT, that an old-fashioned, gun-type nuclear device, which is much bigger,heavier, and needs more fuel(you CANNOT use plutonium, you MUST use uranium, in a gun bomb, plutonium must be "fast fissioned"in an implosion sphere"),would be much easier to construct, but STILL, you need a neutron generator or initiator device, as you descrbed. The electronics to initiate such a gun-type device are MUCH simpler, than an implosion bomb, and THIS would be a more likely worry, NOT a suitcase-type micro-sized implosion bomb, that needs to worry about maintenance of the tritium, neutron generator, firing ckty, batteries,and so on. In such a gun-type device, you need a significant amount of highly enriched U235, however,and THIS is where the terrorists would (hopefully) run into a problem.