Meanwhile, spotter drones are getting smaller and more stealthy. How do you detect, much less shoot down, a drone the size of a small bird or even an insect?
Ever C4 inside a grasshopper (as the grasshopper also need space to move), is going to be tiny.
Even if you made the grasshopper out of solid, but explosive plastic, a mini nuke would be far scarier.
I wonder, what the minimal size of a nuke is. I'm sure we have limits, due to materials, explosive force to cause the compression wave, etc, but I wonder the theoretical limited mini size.
I mean, what if an earwig could enter your ear, into your canal, then go boom, and turn your brain to mush?
Critical mass for plutonium is 10 KG. A nuke needs to be supercritical, plus the mechanism of the bomb itself. Smallest nuke ever built is 50kg, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_devic...
Smallest nukes were phased out by all major nations because there is too much risk of them getting lost, falling into wrong hands, being used without authorisation, etc. Several 'big' nukes were already lost and never found
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of... Note that explosive compression lowers the critical mass, but it soon requires more than one gram of high explosive to trim the fissile material budget by one gram, so minimal-size devices are still in the range of kilograms.
The individual units could travel a circuitous route to the actual target without raising much suspicion and once in the immediate vicinity they could be programmed to rapidly converge on the target.
That's how I see it. With self-assembling munitions you have less waste of resources, you can target individuals in a command structure or individual critical components of their military infrastructure and you could do it with things that could be made to be relatively inconspicuous so that an observer could see them as a normal part of the environment. Until they converge of course and if this happens fast enough it can be difficult for the targeted entity to unravel exactly how it all went down.
Future war looks scary to me.
Why are you self-assembling anything when you can park a remotely operated machine gun along someone's driving route?
This just provides another tool in the inventory. You're forcing the adversary to plan for strategies to mitigate attacks like this. Everyone already knows about remote-controlled machine guns and those who feel threatened by the prospect of having something like this used against them are actively working to mitigate the threat.
With a self-assembling munition you have a new, novel method of conducting an attack that literally forces an adversary to use a zero trust threat model 24 hours a day against every little thing that moves once the adversary understands how it happened.
When the grass can suddenly come alive with dormant, self-assembling munitions that have suddenly detected that a target on their list is in the vicinity then it adds another layer of complexity to force protection since both human and material assets could be targeted at any time from any direction by something like a bug-sized bot that may not even register in your consciousness until it is too late.
That's all I'm thinking.
The American W82 155mm nuclear artillery shell[0] weighed 43kg (95lb), was 860 mm (34 in) long, and had a yield of 2 kilotons -- equivalent to 500 full WW2 heavy bomber loads.
These shells (as well as bombs and warheads with similar yields, carried by planes and missiles, respectively) are called tactical nuclear weapons -- meant for use on the battlefield, to break up enemy formations. Their blast radius is relatively small. It was theorized that if the Cold War went hot and a conventional WW3 broke out, if the Soviet Union was pushing NATO forces back, then the Americans would authorize the use of tactical nuclear warheads. This would likely cause a spiral of escalation, up to a strategic nuclear exchange.