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If I understood this correctly, the main challenge in nuclear bomb design is to time the conventional explosions in such a way that the resulting blast will compress the nuclear material, achieving critical mass, and not simply tearing it all apart.

So I think that this fire would probably not have caused a nuclear explosion.




Years of testing have never yielded a nuclear detonation from the conventional explosives cooking off in a warhead - radioactive strewn desert in Australia is a testament to the British testing this directly.

Nuclear bombs require absurd - something on the order of microseconds (I suspect nanoseconds probably come into play) detonation precision in order to reach super-criticality.




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