I’ll happily admit if I was asked to do this I’d run away screaming.
That being said, once it’s failed detonation (and you’ve cut off any possible signals to the detonator), wouldn’t you roughly expect it to be as dangerous as transporting one?
They mention the large chunk of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary* explosive in there, but the key attribute of ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶ secondary explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger. So the only failure mode is “somehow the detonator itself has entered a state that did not detonate with the initial signal, but will eventually detonate after >1hr”, which you’d _hope_(!) it was wired to prevent.
Again, I’d shit myself immediately in this scenario. Just interesting from an engineering perspective
*see comment below, `high` explosive does not mean "hard to detonate". Cursory searches for the [limited] information on the trigger-explosive used in nuclear weapons suggest they were mostly secondary explosives, and also will probably have put me on a new watchlist!
> They mention the large chunk of high explosive in there, but the key attribute of high explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger.
I think the term you might mean is "secondary explosive"? Because as stated this is _very_ wrong. Nitroglycerine is a high explosive. Nitrogen triiodide is a high explosive. Not really compounds known for being hard to trigger, unless you consider a light featherdusting to be rough treatment.
Otherwise I suspect you have a good point, just the terminology seems wrong to me.
Yes, I am wrong it seems. I am unsure where I got the high<->secondary mixup from, I'm sure I saw something talking about high explosive and defining it strictly as "needs supersonic shock wave to initiate", but have just checked and can't find anything saying that. Will edit my prior comment, thanks
I'm far from an expert (I just like fun parts of youtube xD) but I'm wondering if the terms just get conflated because the only high explosives anyone will use a large amount of by choice are the stable ones, so they're (almost?) all secondaries too.
Primary explosive: Sensitive, used in very small quantities to initiate the main charge.
Secondary explosive: Takes quite a bit of energy to initiate and therefore reasonably stable.
High explosive: I forget the exact technical distinction from low explosive, but it refers to how it goes off, not how energetic it is.
In the real world nobody but a terrorist uses any more of a primary explosive than is needed to set off the secondary, and they are kept apart for as long as possible. You put the charge in place then you insert the detonator cap.
However, these are nukes. Obviously, we don't know details but there's another technology in use: exploding blast wires. A blast wire has no primary explosive, it is set off by pushing a huge current through a tiny wire. This is done both for timing reasons (you need great precision in imploding the plutonium) and because primary explosives cook off in fire. Secondary explosives often do not. While the heat causing a detonator to cook off isn't going to produce a nuclear yield it would still make an awful mess.