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It's remarkable and humorous how it's just a gun. Like this is how the Victorians would have approached fusion. More power to them! We need to test a myriad of

It's remarkable and humorous how it's just a gun. Like this is how the Victorians would have approached fusion. More power to them! We need to test a myriad of approaches. This could well turn out to be the best one.

Izikiel43 5y ago
I’m amazed the British did this first instead of Americans
- smachiz 5y ago
  Hah - this sounds not dissimilar from the first fission bombs that were "gun" type.
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  Americans would of course do it with a nuke. Which actually they have already done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
colechristensen 5y ago
"Little Boy" the first nuke deployed in Japan was also just a gun, firing a lump of enriched uranium at another lump of enriched uranium at the end of a tube.
- phkahler 5y ago
  I was going to say it fired a slug through a cylindrical piece of material, but decided to verify this on Wikipedia. It turns out: >> For the first fifty years after 1945, every published description and drawing of the Little Boy mechanism assumed that a small, solid projectile was fired into the center of a larger, stationary target.[31] However, critical mass considerations dictated that in Little Boy the larger, hollow piece would be the projectile. I had never heard this before and was in denial reading the part above that. So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light. Edit: Following the reference is was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Moreso: a set of hollow rings. So, maybe the rings didn't nest together until they hit the target.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light. Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested. The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output. It is physically impossible for a small rogue actor to make a bomb from scratch. Germany during WWII, for example, was far advanced toward a bomb years before the Manhattan project, but their industrial capacity was simply never sufficient to build it.
    - acchow 5y ago
      > The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output Is this still true in the 2020s?
      - ramesh31 5y ago
        >Is this still true in the 2020s? The laws of physics haven't changed in 80 years. Even if you started with yellow cake uranium (~70% enriched, and itself already nearly impossible for a non-state actor to acquire), to reach weapons grade at >95% you'd need hundreds of tons of it, and massive industrial scale chemical facilities to convert that into uranium hexafluoride and pull out the U235 isotopes [0], where the ratio of U235 to U238 (the non-fissile isotope) is 99:1. The vast majority of the Manhattan Project was in the engineering challenges required to do this, not really in the construction of the bomb. So far, only 5 countries in the world have been able to do it. [0] https://web.evs.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uf6/index.cfm#:~:text=Uranium%20hexafluoride%20is%20a%20chemical,solid%2C%20liquid%2C%20or%20gas https://web.evs.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uf6/index.cfm#:~:text=....
- thehappypm 5y ago
  The other bomb (Fat Man) used a different approach, using explosives to radically compress a ball of Plutonium.
apendleton 5y ago
In fairness to them, the ultimate plan is for something at least slightly less gun-like. They're using these gunpowder charges during testing, but eventually plan to move to some kind of electromagnetic mass-driver setup to make the projectile go. (So, maybe like a railgun or coilgun, which... I guess are still guns, but not like, gun-guns).
sbierwagen 5y ago
To be fair, that's exactly how artificial nuclear fusion was done for the first time, (Also by the Brits, in 1934) accelerating a deuterium beam at a deuterated target: https://www.nature.com/articles/133413a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/133413a0 Just with a really small gun and little teeny bullets.

Izikiel43 5y ago

I’m amazed the British did this first instead of Americans

smachiz 5y ago
Hah - this sounds not dissimilar from the first fission bombs that were "gun" type.
Gravityloss 5y ago
Americans would of course do it with a nuke. Which actually they have already done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike

colechristensen 5y ago

"Little Boy" the first nuke deployed in Japan was also just a gun, firing a lump of enriched uranium at another lump of enriched uranium at the end of a tube.

phkahler 5y ago
I was going to say it fired a slug through a cylindrical piece of material, but decided to verify this on Wikipedia. It turns out: >> For the first fifty years after 1945, every published description and drawing of the Little Boy mechanism assumed that a small, solid projectile was fired into the center of a larger, stationary target.[31] However, critical mass considerations dictated that in Little Boy the larger, hollow piece would be the projectile. I had never heard this before and was in denial reading the part above that. So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light. Edit: Following the reference is was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Moreso: a set of hollow rings. So, maybe the rings didn't nest together until they hit the target.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light. Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested. The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output. It is physically impossible for a small rogue actor to make a bomb from scratch. Germany during WWII, for example, was far advanced toward a bomb years before the Manhattan project, but their industrial capacity was simply never sufficient to build it.
  - acchow 5y ago
    > The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output Is this still true in the 2020s?
    - ramesh31 5y ago
      >Is this still true in the 2020s? The laws of physics haven't changed in 80 years. Even if you started with yellow cake uranium (~70% enriched, and itself already nearly impossible for a non-state actor to acquire), to reach weapons grade at >95% you'd need hundreds of tons of it, and massive industrial scale chemical facilities to convert that into uranium hexafluoride and pull out the U235 isotopes [0], where the ratio of U235 to U238 (the non-fissile isotope) is 99:1. The vast majority of the Manhattan Project was in the engineering challenges required to do this, not really in the construction of the bomb. So far, only 5 countries in the world have been able to do it. [0] https://web.evs.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uf6/index.cfm#:~:text=Uranium%20hexafluoride%20is%20a%20chemical,solid%2C%20liquid%2C%20or%20gas https://web.evs.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uf6/index.cfm#:~:text=....
thehappypm 5y ago
The other bomb (Fat Man) used a different approach, using explosives to radically compress a ball of Plutonium.

apendleton 5y ago

In fairness to them, the ultimate plan is for something at least slightly less gun-like. They're using these gunpowder charges during testing, but eventually plan to move to some kind of electromagnetic mass-driver setup to make the projectile go. (So, maybe like a railgun or coilgun, which... I guess are still guns, but not like, gun-guns).

sbierwagen 5y ago

To be fair, that's exactly how artificial nuclear fusion was done for the first time, (Also by the Brits, in 1934) accelerating a deuterium beam at a deuterated target: https://www.nature.com/articles/133413a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/133413a0 Just with a really small gun and little teeny bullets.