re: The 3 megaton h-bomb that almost detonated over North Carolina.

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patrol the US skies with nukes on the plane?

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The snakes were ineffective

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From a mental model both the "gun style" fission device and the Tellar-Ulam design (or the reverse engineered Soviet version of the same thing) involves a combination of weapon components, but neither can accurately be described as "slamming two halves together".

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This is what I had visualized.

As discussed earlier in the thread, that schematic is largely the result of speculation at what the design was before some of the concepts were declassified.

There was even speculation that it involved shooting a uranium plug towards a hollow uranium cylinder.

We now know it was actually the flip of that concept. It involved the cylinder as the projectile and the plug as the target.

(As to why that particular design, it is probably still classified but it most likely has to do with it being the best design for assembling a critical mass of uranium fast enough without blowing itself apart before a complete chain reaction can occur [a so called nuclear fizzle.])

Just looked it up. As it turns out, having a spherical assembly in the gun barrel nuclear weapon design increases the risk of predetonation. If that occurs, the bomb destroys itself well before a sustainable chain reaction occurs (a fizzle).

So Little Boy used a cylindrical assembly. Not necessarily the best design for perpetuating a neutron/fission chain reaction, but they got around it by putting in a neutron emitter that would be activated once the projectile impacted the target.