2 ms·
No. pretty much (gross oversimplification, but this is the essence of it) all you need for a nuclear bomb is to slam 2 or more subcritical chunks of sufficientl
by orib 18y ago
No. pretty much (gross oversimplification, but this is the essence of it) all you need for a nuclear bomb is to slam 2 or more subcritical chunks of sufficiently enriched uranium into each other fast enough to fuse them to a single supercritical chunk of the above, and you have a boom. The hard part is the uranium. Compared to producing the uranium, designing and manufacturing a viable bomb is trivial.
I remember reading about a US research project where someone with reasonable physics knowledge, but no specific knowledge on the workings of atomic bombs, managed to put together viable plans for a bomb from only publically available information.
- tesseract 18y agoIt sounds simple but you've got two roadblocks to overcome. The first is "sufficiently enriched uranium" which is expensive to obtain. The second is "fast enough", since if you don't assemble the material fast enough and hold it together for long enough it will blow itself apart before there is a chance for the chain reaction to build, and you will have a dud (at least compared to the intended yield). To get around this problem you will probably need some fairly advanced shaped charges and a properly designed tamper. This is what the "nuclear secrets" cover. Obviously it is possible to derive this information for oneself, but it's non-trivial to say the least.
- noodle 18y agoaccording to my understanding, again, one of the major issues of the fission-based bombs (that you describe here, instead of the thermonuclear weapons), is that one of the major issues and one of the "nuclear secrets" is thus: how do you ensure that in that collision, how to ensure that the "slamming" consumes enough of the uranium, converting it into boom, before the boom destroys the weapon itself, halting the reaction. but again, not an expert. i'd love to hear more on it if you or someone else are.