Disarming Nuclear Bombs

Hm, for some reason this post never got published. Made a lot more sense the week I saw three nuclear weapons disarmed on TV, but here it is:

Disarming a nuclear weapon pops up occasionally on TV and in movies (I'm looking at you Chuck, Castle and even SGU). They always make it seem like a super complicated task. I'm not sure that it is all that difficult (this is one of those posts where I'm way outside my realm of knowledge).

What I'm willing to concede:
-Even if you know how to disarm a nuclear bomb it would be crazy scary.
-Conventional bombs may have fake wires and components that will cause the bomb to explode if tampered with and it is possible that a nuclear bomb would also have this.

But:
Nuclear weapons are really hard to make. Getting the material may be the hardest part, but even with the material it is quite a task. My understanding is those scientists at Los Alamos (many of the greatest in American history) were provided the radio active material. Today a semi-trained bomb maker with some parts from radio shack and a lawn store can make a conventional bomb, but only certain governments have made nuclear weapons.

Something that hard to make shouldn't be too hard to stop.

Typically nuclear weapons work by using a conventional explosive to smash two pieces of radio active material together. Dirty bombs work by having a conventional bomb spread radio active material. So the key is just to separate the radioactive part from the conventional weapon.

Yes it is good to stop the conventional weapon as well to avoid any damage and yes the bomb maker might make that tricky, but then the scary part is disarming a bomb, not disarming a NUCLEAR bomb.

Ok, maybe it isn't super easy, but definitely seems more straight forward than whatever they end up doing on TV. Plus while they are screwing around with guessing which wire they could be trying to get the material and conventional bomb as far away from each other as possible.

I took a look on the web to see what others think and here's wired's take.