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No. A gun-type atomic weapon, the type used on Hiroshima, can be built by any decent machine shop with enough enriched uranium. (It's so simple that the Manhatt
by TMWNN 5y ago
No. A gun-type atomic weapon, the type used on Hiroshima, can be built by any decent machine shop with enough enriched uranium. (It's so simple that the Manhattan Project did not bother to test it; the Trinity bomb was the more complicated implosion-type weapon used on Nagasaki.) The Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb's theoretical underpinnings are still not public; the technique is perhaps the only known example of "born secret" technology in the US, something that the government can use prior restraint to block publication of.
It is true that, as arethuza said, knowing that a Teller-Ulam device can be built certainly contributed to the Soviets, British, French, Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis building their own hydrogen weapons. But that is not the same thing as those nations having specific knowledge of the US's pioneering method.
- lmm 5y ago> It is true that, as arethuza said, knowing that a Teller-Ulam device can be built certainly contributed to the Soviets, British, French, Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis building their own hydrogen weapons. But that is not the same thing as those nations having specific knowledge of the US's pioneering method. If the end result is the same, does it matter? It doesn't seem like keeping those details secret slowed those other nations down by much.
- TMWNN 5y ago>If the end result is the same, does it matter? It doesn't seem like keeping those details secret slowed those other nations down by much. For nations, no. For non nation-states, yes. As I said, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups can build an atomic weapon if they can get enriched uranium. Building a hydrogen weapon is much more difficult in terms of obtaining components and knowing what to do with them. The builders need some level of theoretical understanding of how the weapon works.
- simonh 5y agoLooking back over 75+ years of atomic weapons research slowing them down by a few years or even a decade might not seem like much, but at the time such delays could have been very significant.
- arethuza 5y agoI don't think it slowed down the Soviets much - Andrei Sakharov seems to have worked out the staging approach pretty quickly after seeing the results of analysis of the Castle Bravo test (i.e. the first one to use lithium deuteride).