Considering that you only need the warhead: absolutely.
Easily. That is one reason why ports and other national entry points have systems in place to detect that. Of course there is nothing to stop a bad actor from reaching the border or coast with a weapon and setting it off.
I’ll add to what other people are saying with a caveat.
Detonating a Nuke at ground level significantly reduces it’s effectiveness and range. It’s still going to be bad, but it won’t be city levelling bad. A couple of miles at best for the worst explosion/fire damage, even if it’s stronger than Fat Man.
There’s a reason why the two bombs dropped on Japan were detonated at 500-600 meters(1600-1900 feet) above the ground.
Doesn’t the ground just absorb about half of the energy? (And become nasty fallout)
Fat Man was tiny by later standards. The B41, which was actually deployed, was three orders of magnitude more powerful. Sizes have come down again since delivery got really accurate, but the workhorse B61 can be dialed to somewhere from 10 to 20 times Fat Man’s yield.
It absorbs a lot, and it channels a lot of the blast up.
Yes, but also its not easy to smuggle a large bomb either.
Yes, they even put nukes in backpacks
Yes, but at this point it would be cheaper and quicker to have spacex fly to orbit, capture a 5 ton rock and drop it on a city.
There’s a reason Iran has been ‘weeks’ from making a bomb for decades now.
That would be a really shitty nuke. Like around 10% of a Davy Crockett.
Use a bigger rock. I might change the cost by hundreds of millions, and still be less than the billions in development and production for a nuke.
Where do you get these rocks though? There is actually a similar concept that uses tungsten rods instead of rocks.
But the entire thing isn’t really practical. If you want the ability to strike any place on earth in a reasonable time, you’d to have hundreds of tungsten rod equipped satellites (or rocks with rocket engines attached to them) in orbit at the same time.
I’m not sure it would actually be cheaper than just using nukes on ballistic missiles.
The expense of a delivering the nuke is negligible in comparison to the cost and effort of building a nuke. So much so, that large rocks are more economical than building a nuke at this point.
Building nukes isn’t that expensive. The most expensive part is probably building the enrichment facilities, but that’s a one-time investment. Once you have all the material, a nuke isn’t that complicated to build. A bunch of students basically designed one that was deemed to be functional.
On the other hand, launching hundreds, possibly thousands of multi-ton projectiles into orbit is extremely expensive. And of course you have to maintain them in space somehow, possibly for decades. Either that or you have to de-orbit and replace them, which would mean regularly bombarding the ocean or some desert …
It’s just not practical. Even if it was I highly doubt it would be cheaper.