Will I get in trouble for blogging about this? I sure hope not. This mornings NYT Science section discusses the possibility that a new element has been created - element 118. Element 118 was created by bashing atoms of Calcium into a Californium target using a cyclotron. Californium is highly radioactive and a very, very dangerous material. It has a very small critical mass and thus theoretically could be used to make a "pocket nuke", a term I've never heard before (I've heard of suitcase nukes). Unlikely, primarily due to expense of producing enough Cf I imagine.
One more thing I found out. The USA passed a law in 1994 making it pretty unlikely that the USA would make a nuke with a yield smaller than 5 kilotons of tnt. I guess this was to prevent the manufacture of "pocket nukes".
The law was repealed in 2004.
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