6 ms·

A Hydrogen Bomb by any other name

101 points by caf 11y ago

DenisM 11y ago
No mention of Tsar bomba in the article about history of nuclear bombs? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
- caf 11y ago
  There was no argument about nomenclature by then - at that point the Soviets were well understood to have Teller-Ulam style devices (as the article says, the Soviets built their first one in '55).
- ekianjo 11y ago
  That's not the point of the article at all. Why you would want it to be there?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
burn_and_crash 11y ago
I have to wonder whether China is involved in any way here. Would they be able to use North Korea as a cover to test their weapons?
- cbd1984 11y ago
  It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test. It would be outright ludicrous for China to imagine that they could use North Korea to test advanced weaponry without anyone tracing it back to them.
  - japaw 11y ago
    Besides China, there are other sources North Korea can have used to aquiver this technology. Both North Korea, Libya, Iran and China did get help developing nuclear technology from a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist often regarded as the fonder of the Pakistani nuclear enrichment program. He again acquired the technology in Europe when working for Urenco, a nuclear fuel company. The whole Q.A Khan affair is quit a fascinating story actually. Some more information on http://world.time.com/2011/07/07/a-q-khans-revelations-did-pakistans-army-sell-nukes-to-north-korea/ http://world.time.com/2011/07/07/a-q-khans-revelations-did-p... and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan I did also see a very good documentary about this, but I can not find it online right now. Edit: Here is the BBC documentary about Khans dealings in nuclear secrets: http://www.unewstv.com/6821/bbc-documentary-on-dr-abdul-qadeer-khan-pakistan-nuclear-secrets http://www.unewstv.com/6821/bbc-documentary-on-dr-abdul-qade... . Stranger then fiction, it has a plot like a top thriller movie.
    - meric 11y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if the nuclear physicist in The Dictator was based on Khan. He sounds like he's proud of his work and I admire that, moral judgements on nuclear weapons aside.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    "It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test." More like when a D student marks their own test, scores 5% and announces they've passed.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    But the current situation is more analogous to a D student getting a D on the big test. Their first nuclear tests were so weak that there was debate over what they even were, and they almost certainly did not represent a successful test of the intended bomb yield. This latest test was pretty definitely nuclear, but if it was a fusion weapon as claimed then it was again a major failure. I'm not sure if any other nuclear weapons state has had such a string of failures. Both the US and USSR had successful full yields for their tests of their first fission and fusion bombs. China's first fusion weapon test yielded over 3 megatons. North Korea's test yielded probably under 10 kilotons, and they're going around bragging about an H-bomb. I'd say that deserves a D, at best.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    Is China supposed to be the D student? They're the third in class, pissed that they're neither valedictorian nor salutatorian. Definitely not the D student. And it's not North Korea either, as they're F- students. I still don't understand the big deal here, they fizzle-yielded their first two tests, and their claims of an H-bomb are ridiculous. They don't have the infrastructure, expertise, or materials to make Ulam-Tellers. This is bad propaganda from crackpot murderers.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- hydrogen18 11y ago
  Why would China need North Korea to test its nuclear weapons? They have a long history of nuclear tests and are a member of the club so to speak. They never did the large tests that the Soviet Union or the US did, but I don't see why they would. No one needs a 1+ megaton warhead if you have an accurate delivery system.
zatkin 11y ago
It would have been nice if this article had some diagrams of the respective bomb designs. I was having trouble trying to piece together where components were and had to do a few Google Image searches to follow along.
- arethuza 11y ago
  The relevant Wikipedia page has some decent diagrams - from the original Ivy Mike Sausage style cylindrical secondaries through to very modern designs like the W88: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon I can also recommend "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes for more details.
- brandmeyer 11y ago
  http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/ http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/ has quite a bit of detail, especially about fusion-boosted weapons and Tellar-Ulam weapons.
peletiah 11y ago
Interesting how one can write an article about thermonuclear bombs and calls them hydrogen bombs all along.
- spuz 11y ago
  Aren't they the same thing?
  - peletiah 11y ago
    Not precisely. Most of the energy of a thermonuclear bomb comes from fission, the fusion reaction mostly serves as a booster for neutron flux, escalating the fission reaction further than in a pure fission weapon. Even more so when the enclosing capsule (The tamper) is made of U238 instead of lead, as the high neutron flux leads to fission in the tamper (The Tsar Bomb would have had a yield of 100MT instead of 50MT had it's tamper not been replaced by lead, an intentional restriction). A proper hydrogen bomb would be purely fusion.
    - robotresearcher 11y ago
      > A proper hydrogen bomb would be purely fusion. But a fission device is used to get the fusion reaction going in all practical designs, I think. The fine article describes the design of the US's actual hydrogen bombs as follows - I don't know if you'd count them as 'proper': > So there are really three stages of nuclear reaction in such a bomb: the primary (fission), the secondary’s internal fuel (fusion), and the secondary’s casing (more fission).
    - mikeash 11y ago
      The term "hydrogen bomb" has been used to describe thermonuclear bombs more or less since they were invented. Given that background, it makes no sense to me to insist that a "proper hydrogen bomb" would refer to a pure fusion design, especially since nobody has ever come anywhere close to figuring out how to build such a thing.
- Symmetry 11y ago
  You can't really complain when a article in the non-specialist press uses popular rather than specialist terminology. "Hydrogen bomb" is a term that's been bandied about for about as long as nuclear bombs have existed and the article properly points out that there isn't actually any clear definition of the term so I don't think we have anything to complain about.
ck2 11y ago
Who the hell cares if it is just a "regular" a-bomb instead of an h-bomb. Can you imagine if it was Iran with "just" a regular a-bomb? Millions of people in North Korea are starving, eating bark off trees and are horribly repressed. Their nutrition is so bad their children grow far shorter than than their southern counterparts. It's one of the worst abuses of a human population in the world that is completely documented - yet the world shrugs and says "what can we do?" Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before they even had their first scientist write the first formulas for nuclear power. Imagine if they were next to Israel, how fast we'd sell them the jets and bombs to take out the reactors while they were being built. But nope, we don't give a damn.
- misnome 11y ago
  > Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before [...] Except, China.
- chroma 11y ago
  > Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before they even had their first scientist write the first formulas for nuclear power. > Imagine if they were next to Israel, how fast we'd sell them the jets and bombs to take out the reactors while they were being built. > But nope, we don't give a damn. This is not even remotely true. The reason nobody invades North Korea is because the DPRK holds millions of people hostage. I'm not just talking about their own citizens. Any invasion of North Korea would certainly result in the artillery bombardment of Seoul. It would likely also result in a nuclear exchange. The death toll would be higher than any conflict since WWII. The US definitely gives a damn. It gives food to North Korea and military aid to South Korea. I'm sure US officials would love for the Kim regime to fall, but there's simply no way to make that happen without risking millions of innocent lives.
  - redcalx 11y ago
    > I'm sure US officials would love for the Kim regime to fall That's debatable given the regional instability that would cause. This is one of the reasons the US donates food.
  - 11y ago

101 points by caf 11y ago

No mention of Tsar bomba in the article about history of nuclear bombs? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

caf 11y ago
There was no argument about nomenclature by then - at that point the Soviets were well understood to have Teller-Ulam style devices (as the article says, the Soviets built their first one in '55).
ekianjo 11y ago
That's not the point of the article at all. Why you would want it to be there?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

burn_and_crash 11y ago

I have to wonder whether China is involved in any way here. Would they be able to use North Korea as a cover to test their weapons?

cbd1984 11y ago
It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test. It would be outright ludicrous for China to imagine that they could use North Korea to test advanced weaponry without anyone tracing it back to them.
- japaw 11y ago
  Besides China, there are other sources North Korea can have used to aquiver this technology. Both North Korea, Libya, Iran and China did get help developing nuclear technology from a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist often regarded as the fonder of the Pakistani nuclear enrichment program. He again acquired the technology in Europe when working for Urenco, a nuclear fuel company. The whole Q.A Khan affair is quit a fascinating story actually. Some more information on http://world.time.com/2011/07/07/a-q-khans-revelations-did-pakistans-army-sell-nukes-to-north-korea/ http://world.time.com/2011/07/07/a-q-khans-revelations-did-p... and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan I did also see a very good documentary about this, but I can not find it online right now. Edit: Here is the BBC documentary about Khans dealings in nuclear secrets: http://www.unewstv.com/6821/bbc-documentary-on-dr-abdul-qadeer-khan-pakistan-nuclear-secrets http://www.unewstv.com/6821/bbc-documentary-on-dr-abdul-qade... . Stranger then fiction, it has a plot like a top thriller movie.
  - meric 11y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if the nuclear physicist in The Dictator was based on Khan. He sounds like he's proud of his work and I admire that, moral judgements on nuclear weapons aside.
- arethuza 11y ago
  "It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test." More like when a D student marks their own test, scores 5% and announces they've passed.
- mikeash 11y ago
  But the current situation is more analogous to a D student getting a D on the big test. Their first nuclear tests were so weak that there was debate over what they even were, and they almost certainly did not represent a successful test of the intended bomb yield. This latest test was pretty definitely nuclear, but if it was a fusion weapon as claimed then it was again a major failure. I'm not sure if any other nuclear weapons state has had such a string of failures. Both the US and USSR had successful full yields for their tests of their first fission and fusion bombs. China's first fusion weapon test yielded over 3 megatons. North Korea's test yielded probably under 10 kilotons, and they're going around bragging about an H-bomb. I'd say that deserves a D, at best.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
  Is China supposed to be the D student? They're the third in class, pissed that they're neither valedictorian nor salutatorian. Definitely not the D student. And it's not North Korea either, as they're F- students. I still don't understand the big deal here, they fizzle-yielded their first two tests, and their claims of an H-bomb are ridiculous. They don't have the infrastructure, expertise, or materials to make Ulam-Tellers. This is bad propaganda from crackpot murderers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
hydrogen18 11y ago
Why would China need North Korea to test its nuclear weapons? They have a long history of nuclear tests and are a member of the club so to speak. They never did the large tests that the Soviet Union or the US did, but I don't see why they would. No one needs a 1+ megaton warhead if you have an accurate delivery system.

zatkin 11y ago

It would have been nice if this article had some diagrams of the respective bomb designs. I was having trouble trying to piece together where components were and had to do a few Google Image searches to follow along.

arethuza 11y ago
The relevant Wikipedia page has some decent diagrams - from the original Ivy Mike Sausage style cylindrical secondaries through to very modern designs like the W88: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon I can also recommend "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes for more details.
brandmeyer 11y ago
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/ http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/ has quite a bit of detail, especially about fusion-boosted weapons and Tellar-Ulam weapons.

peletiah 11y ago

Interesting how one can write an article about thermonuclear bombs and calls them hydrogen bombs all along.

spuz 11y ago
Aren't they the same thing?
- peletiah 11y ago
  Not precisely. Most of the energy of a thermonuclear bomb comes from fission, the fusion reaction mostly serves as a booster for neutron flux, escalating the fission reaction further than in a pure fission weapon. Even more so when the enclosing capsule (The tamper) is made of U238 instead of lead, as the high neutron flux leads to fission in the tamper (The Tsar Bomb would have had a yield of 100MT instead of 50MT had it's tamper not been replaced by lead, an intentional restriction). A proper hydrogen bomb would be purely fusion.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    > A proper hydrogen bomb would be purely fusion. But a fission device is used to get the fusion reaction going in all practical designs, I think. The fine article describes the design of the US's actual hydrogen bombs as follows - I don't know if you'd count them as 'proper': > So there are really three stages of nuclear reaction in such a bomb: the primary (fission), the secondary’s internal fuel (fusion), and the secondary’s casing (more fission).
  - mikeash 11y ago
    The term "hydrogen bomb" has been used to describe thermonuclear bombs more or less since they were invented. Given that background, it makes no sense to me to insist that a "proper hydrogen bomb" would refer to a pure fusion design, especially since nobody has ever come anywhere close to figuring out how to build such a thing.
Symmetry 11y ago
You can't really complain when a article in the non-specialist press uses popular rather than specialist terminology. "Hydrogen bomb" is a term that's been bandied about for about as long as nuclear bombs have existed and the article properly points out that there isn't actually any clear definition of the term so I don't think we have anything to complain about.

ck2 11y ago

Who the hell cares if it is just a "regular" a-bomb instead of an h-bomb. Can you imagine if it was Iran with "just" a regular a-bomb? Millions of people in North Korea are starving, eating bark off trees and are horribly repressed. Their nutrition is so bad their children grow far shorter than than their southern counterparts. It's one of the worst abuses of a human population in the world that is completely documented - yet the world shrugs and says "what can we do?" Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before they even had their first scientist write the first formulas for nuclear power. Imagine if they were next to Israel, how fast we'd sell them the jets and bombs to take out the reactors while they were being built. But nope, we don't give a damn.

misnome 11y ago
> Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before [...] Except, China.
chroma 11y ago
> Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before they even had their first scientist write the first formulas for nuclear power. > Imagine if they were next to Israel, how fast we'd sell them the jets and bombs to take out the reactors while they were being built. > But nope, we don't give a damn. This is not even remotely true. The reason nobody invades North Korea is because the DPRK holds millions of people hostage. I'm not just talking about their own citizens. Any invasion of North Korea would certainly result in the artillery bombardment of Seoul. It would likely also result in a nuclear exchange. The death toll would be higher than any conflict since WWII. The US definitely gives a damn. It gives food to North Korea and military aid to South Korea. I'm sure US officials would love for the Kim regime to fall, but there's simply no way to make that happen without risking millions of innocent lives.
- redcalx 11y ago
  > I'm sure US officials would love for the Kim regime to fall That's debatable given the regional instability that would cause. This is one of the reasons the US donates food.
- 11y ago