Originally Posted by
tartare
Yes, you are correct - such a bomb would not require crew shielding.
But there is no way on earth an un-authorised commercial airliner, let alone one carrying a Hiroshima type weapon would be able to get anywhere near Israeli airspace without the IAF knowing and shooting it down first.
The Hiroshima gun-type weapon would therefore need to be surface delivered, by a truck (it's 10 feet long, 2 feet wide and weighs 4.4 tons).
There might be a remote chance of such a truck making it's way into a major Israeli population centre undetected by the Israeli army, Shin Bet, the Aman or Mossad.
If it was then detonated, then yes it would cause widespread devastation in a densely populated city like Tel Aviv (having been there).
Likelihood? Mossad's human intelligence in Iran is such that it knew the location of the Iranian military leaders and scientists' bedrooms in the buildings it struck. Not just the building, the exact side and height of the building where to strike.
Israel is being fed measurement and signature intelligence by the US, and has it's own highly capable imagery and signals intelligence capabilities.
I highly doubt the likelihood of such a device being able to be delivered in reality - unless I am missing something.
Tartare,
You raise some very good points and one, in particular, that has been a great source of frustration in both my reading and questioning--- that of delivery.
Even some very good geo-strategic writers seem to have a blind spot when it comes to the assumption that if the Iranians were to have a weapon that they would, ipso facto, immediately use it.
While I cannot, of course, out of hand refute that assumption, I can question it. How would it be delivered? Wouldn't the Israelis have known that one was being readied? To me there is a bit of gap between having the actual weapon and employing it.
I carry no truck for that nasty theocratic clan in Tehran and it's desire for a nuke, but I do value exactitude in reporting and decision making so I am disappointed when such phrases as "they will immediately use it" are so blithely tossed about.
As you stated, the Israelis knew down to the meter where the military leadership was so one would think that they had a good purview over all the rest.
Now the question is how much support the Russian and Chinese will provide going forward. China, for one, enjoys the oil.
Either way, good work for raising the point of this not being so automatic as many have made it out to be. Frankly I just think Bibi told Trump to jump and the latter asked "how high?"