can a atomic bomb be stoped

It depends, you'd have to be more specific.

Do you mean one of those lame Hollywood timers? Sure, that could be stopped. After a nuke has been fired from a silo? Probably. They likely have some abort failsafe built into the missles. Or do you mean dropped from a plane? Again, probably.

I assume you mean some kind of unstoppable hollywood timer where you have only a few minutes to deactive a nuke that's on a critical countdown with nothing more than impromptu tools that may be available?

There's lots of different types of nuclear weapons been made over the decades. I guess a terrorist would be more likely to get their insane little hands on an older redundant nuke, or perhaps we'd be dealing with a low tech' rogue state in this imaginary scenario?

Ok, let's assume we're deactivating a really old WW2 early Cold War era nuke. These original uranium bombs held the fissle material at one end of the casing and a U235 bullet at the other. Conventional explosives would fire the U235 pellet into the supercritial mass, then boom! I recon we prevent a nuclear explosion simply by cutting it in half with a handy blow torch or two There's still be the regular explosion, but so long as the pellet misses, happy days. Plausible

With the next generation of nukes, that of the plutionium persuasion, the design changed. Less plutonium is needed and so they could afford to build in some extra tech'. With these they typically wrapped panels of explosives around the plutonium mass, then detonate them in a very specific and timed manner, creating enough pressure to detonate the supercritical mass.

The idea used in the movie The Peacemaker, where they remove a single explosive panel surrounding the plutonium would be feasible, although I suspect you'd need to remove at least 25% to 50% of the panels to be sure. You'd end up with yet another healthy conventional explosion spewing nuclear matter all over the place, but again, no nuclear explosion, so happy days. Plausible.

Where we hit a stumbling block is with the latest nukes. These are made up of several layers including an outer layer of conventional explosives, a layer of exotic metals such as beryllium, which reflects neutrons back into the fission process, the plutonium itself and finally an neutron initiator inside of the plutonium.

To deactivate one of these bad boys, you'd need to remove 25%-50% of the explosives, then remove a healthy chunk of the exotic cataclyst metals, bore through the plutonium and extract the initiator.... this I doubt could be done outside of a highly specialised lab'. - busted.

Of course, my understanding of nukes is incomplete lol, but so is the nature of your question

This message has been edited. Last edited by: xenomorph,