This is, to put it bluntly but simply, complete bullshit.
Anyone with actual astronomy experience will literally laugh at that paper. It is about 65% irrelevant padding that provides nothing towards their thesis and is there to look intimidating and impressive.
Thermonuclear bombs run off deuterium fusion - proton-proton reactions have such a low cross-section and rate that you really can't get it to happen at their temperatures. And the thermonuclear explosion itself only uses up some of its TIGHTLY PACKED SOLID fuel right next to a fission explosion before it rarifies to the point that it just can't keep reacting. To fuse protons you need gravitational confinement, not inertial confinement.
Stars are well within a range of conditions where they exhibit negative feedback. That is, if they heat up, they expand and the adiabatic expansion cools them to a point that they produce less energy.
On top of that, even if you accelerated the rate of fusion temporarily in part of a star... so what? The heat produced per unit volume of the sun's core is less than that of a compost heap and orders of magnitude less than human flesh. At the heat capacity of over a ton of hydrogen plasma per cubic meter, a temporary increase in heat output of a small region isn't destablizing anything.
On top of that, the last two points refer to the core. They are talking about mucking with the surface. If you heated up part of a star not normally hot enough to cause fusion, even if you managed to heat up it would just expand away and mix.
On top of that, far more energetic events than nuclear explosions happen to stars all the time. Magnetic events on the surface of the sun regularly relase more energy than all of Earth's nuclear arsenals at once. There are stars with gigatons per second of gas pulled off a puffed-up companion star falling onto a small spot on their surface at 800 km/s, where that spot glows X-ray hot and outshines the rest of the star. There are sun-sized stars that we can tell by their lithium content (which is burned up by nuclear reactions at much lower temperatures than other elements throughout the stellar volume) ate entire gas giants that fell into them at hundreds of kilometers per second within the last 50 million years.
And they compare the approach of a solid object across millions of kilometers in which the blackbody temperature exceeds 2500 C and gas at millions of degrees streams past, and at the surface falling at 600 km/s through 5800K gas, to the galilleo probe which fell through regular gas for 70 seconds at 60 km/s (and burned away more than half its mass in the process)?
I don't care if this was authored by Isaac Newton, it's utter bullshit and the idea of someone taking it seriously confuses me.
I don't care if this was authored by Isaac Newton, it's utter bullshit and the idea of someone taking it seriously confuses me.
That is because you don't grasp, on a gut level, that most other people know less physics than you. (Philosophy major here, I didn't know what to think of this paper until this thread.)
Bolonkin & Friedlander (2013) argues that it might be possible for "a dying dictator" to blow up the Sun, and thus destroy all life on Earth:
Warning: the paper is published in an obscure journal by publisher #206 on Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013, and I was unable to find confirmation of the authors' claimed credentials from any reputable sources with 5 minutes of Googling. It also has two spelling errors in the abstract. (It has no citations on Google scholar, but I wouldn't expect it to have any since it was only released in July 2013.)
I haven't read the paper, and I'd love to see someone fluent in astrophysics comment on its contents.
My guess is that this is not a risk at all or, as with proposed high-energy physics disasters, the risk is extremely low-probability but physically conceivable (though perhaps not by methods imagined by Bolonkin & Friedlander).