A Florida Man in the 90's made a homemade atomic bomb with paint scrapings from clocks and old chemistry kits specifically because he couldn't do it with the newer stuff.
Radium cannot sustain a chain reaction because it isn't fissile. You would need to split about 31 billion atoms every second just to power a tiny 1-watt LED bulb. Chain reactions are important for bombs.
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u/agedlikesage 2h ago
What are you thinking of? They stopped using radium in the 60s