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I'm interested in how technically difficult building an actual nuclear weapon would be if you got your hands on one of these samples. The idea that crazy islami
by meesles 11y ago
I'm interested in how technically difficult building an actual nuclear weapon would be if you got your hands on one of these samples. The idea that crazy islamic extremists could one day get their hands on this uranium and cause significant, extended damage is truly terrifying.
- danbruc 11y agoWith enough uranium and no expectation of high efficiency it is probably not too hard to build a gun type device and I think very well doable by a terrorist group. The tricky part is doing it with little material and high efficiency. And of course a dirty bomb is trivial but also not nearly as scary as often portrait.
- madaxe_again 11y agoYep. Implosion devices are tricky and require serious hydrodynamic engineering, but you could build a "gun" or "layer cake" type device without too much expertise. They have the added "advantage" of being very dirty (inefficient).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 3pt14159 11y agoIt's pretty easy if you have resources. The hard part isn't building the bomb if you have weapons grade fissile material. The hard part is doing it without FVEY getting wind of it.
- forgotmypassw 11y agoLess terrifying as opposed to governements hoarding massive amounts of weapon-grade enriched Uranium?
- SEJeff 11y agoA dirty bomb would be trivial to create, but an actual nuclear device would require some serious expertise and hardware to create
- danbruc 11y agoThis is true for a modern bomb but not so much for something simple. Hell, you can take two subcritical masses and slam them together with your bare hands to start a chain reaction.
- Bjartr 11y agoOr just let the screwdriver slip http://lew-cabintalk.blogspot.com/2012/07/demon-core.html http://lew-cabintalk.blogspot.com/2012/07/demon-core.html
- mikeash 11y agoThe two masses will blow themselves apart before much energy is released. You'll kill yourself but not do much damage. That's why gun-type bombs use explosives to drive the two pieces together.
- smacktoward 11y agoThe expertise and hardware would mostly be required to enrich the uranium up to weapons-grade levels. If you can get uranium that's already been enriched, you can skip all that. Hence the concern.
- showerst 11y agoIn the 60's the government enlisted two fresh physics PHDs to see if they could design a plausible bomb, as a stand in a random country. In they end they succeeded in creating a detailed plan, and it didn't even take them that long. There's much more public info out there now, and machining has improved significantly in the past 50 years, so the main barrier to building a crude bomb is material rather than the expertise or machining. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science
- arethuza 11y agoAnd they designed the, much more complex, implosion style weapon rather than a simple gun based design.
- api 11y agoYou could probably 3d print a device now to a high degree of precision, after modeling it in SolidWorks.
- tlrobinson 11y agoI know 3D printing is fashionable these days, but is there a reason it would be any better than boring old CNC milling that's been around for decades?
- codezero 11y agoIt's terrifying that anyone has their hands on this material.
- hackuser 11y agoEven North Korea pulled it off. Nuclear weapons are 70 year old technology.
- david-given 11y agoI'd imagine that building a proper bomb, i.e. large and efficient one, is quite hard --- the geometry and timing of the implosion charges is complex, fiddly, and difficult to get right the first time. However, building something which squibs, i.e. undergoes a partial criticality and goes bang in a reasonably large but not city-killing way, and spreading a bunch of radioactive material about, is probably much easier. (This is the 'dirty bomb' thing that was getting the press excited a couple of years back.) (Fun fact: if you're locked in a room with a nuke on a timer, your best option is probably to beat the shit out of it with an axe. Provided you can physically damage it enough to upset the implosion geometry, it won't go off properly. Of course, you'll still die, but...)
- lojack 11y ago> However, building something which squibs, i.e. undergoes a partial criticality and goes bang in a reasonably large but not city-killing way, and spreading a bunch of radioactive material about, is probably much easier. (This is the 'dirty bomb' thing that was getting the press excited a couple of years back.) My understanding is that dirty bombs don't even necessarily undergo any nuclear reaction. You don't even need the right kind of material for them. It's just a traditional bomb with radioactive material strapped to it.
- david-given 11y agoMmm... fair point. I'd expect the nuclear bomb to do a better job of vapourising the plutonium than conventional explosives, but I don't know whether that would actually do more damage. Maybe we're better off forgetting about a bomb completely. Grind it up fine, watch while it spontaneously catches fire (plutonium chemistry is weird!), dissolve the plutonium oxide in nitric acid, water down and then drive around the city spraying it into the air in a fine mist...
- mjevans 11y agoThink much more like a grenade; the dirty bomb is looking to use explosives to disperse and 'poison' an area with radioactive contamination.
- ufmace 11y agoIt depends on exactly how much skill these guys have. It's trivially easy, compared to getting the weapons-grade materials in the first place. It's also impossibly difficult, compared to building suicide bomb vests and such. You do need enough of a science and engineering base to be able to build something new, based entirely on theoretical calculations, when you've never seen an example before. If ISIS starts turning out their own rifles, ammo, truck repair parts, maybe some drones or something, or otherwise demonstrates dedication at a societal level to designing and building things, then I'd start to worry. As it is now, it's pretty hard to buy. And speaking of potential damage, a nuclear blast is just the start of the potential issues. The real question, if somebody managed to pull that off, is how would the target of such an attack reply? How would the allies of that target think and expect, and how would any countries that are rivals to the target and/or allied/sympathetic to the suspected attackers react to the response?
- ycosynot 11y agoAnd yet I had gotten downvoted when I said that eventually there will be no privacy at all in cities, because it is too much of a problem. What can go wrong, will go wrong. You just have to wait for the first incident.