3 ms·
I meant in general, for Plutonium you realistically need an implosion type design, but I think theoretically you could even have a gun type Plutonium bomb, just
by danbruc 4y ago
I meant in general, for Plutonium you realistically need an implosion type design, but I think theoretically you could even have a gun type Plutonium bomb, just making clean enough Plutonium is totally uneconomical.
- consp 4y agoAnd you still need a looooong barrel and a fast moving plutonium part (see the thin man design on wikipedia and then extrapolate from there) even creating near close enough pure plutonium since economically you won't have pure.
- bayouborne 4y ago"Parsons’ first order of business was the plutonium gun. Because it needed a muzzle velocity of at least 3,000 feet per second it would have to be 17 feet long. It should weigh no more than a ton, a fifth of the usual weight of a gun that size, which meant it would have to be machined from strong high-alloy steel. It would not require rifling but needed three independently operated primers to make sure it fired. Parsons arranged for the Navy’s gun-design section to engineer it." - Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb
- wnkrshm 4y agoCan you rotate a plutonium "carousel" fast enough and then make all the pieces crash into a wall, onto each other... Edit: Idk, something about flywheels, they can store a huge amount of energy and release it very quickly.
- danbruc 4y agoProbably not, we are talking really short timescales here. The nuclear explosion is over before you can even see the first crack in the housing of your bomb.