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A 1967 experiment that proved anyone can design a nuclear weapon
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- abdullahkhalids 4y agoThis is not surprising at all. The first bombs were made when nuclear physics was not well understood, and the Las Almos computer, was a group of humans working in an assembly line to perform complex calculations by hand. These calculations were required to understand the interaction of the various pieces. A few decades later, the theories of nuclear physics had advanced considerably, IC computers were available for rapid calculations, the algorithms required for these calculations were present in textbooks, as were the results of many computations that did not have to be redone. Today, designing every aspect of a nuclear weapon, from the actual weapon itself to the machines and factories required to manufacture them, is even easier. The only real deterrent to countries building nuclear weapons are political in nature. Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to, but thankfully we are limited to about a dozen of them. This is something to reflect on, when arguing that the spread of bad technology, especially one that does require many millions to manufacture, cannot be stopped.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoNuclear bombs are essentially unprofitable and impossible to use anonymously, so they aren't really analogous to most dangerous tech that needs to be controlled.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoThe armed forces you need to keep neighboring rivals or meddling first world powers out of your borders are also highly unprofitable
- throwaway426079 4y agoYou're right. But I don't think profit is everyone's first concern. The Kim dynasty needs the DPRK army as a tool of internal control more than it does for defense.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoThe benefits that gives them are very much a type of profit.
- dilznoofus 4y agoAnd a few million bucks isn't hard to come by when you're in control of an entire country Even if it's as poor as NK, the guy who commands it can have more material riches than most of us can really consider
- dumbotron 4y agoYou don't use a nuclear bomb. Well, maybe once, somewhere remote. The idea is once you do, you can do anything you want. Want to annex Ukraine? Want to run a country where you're the dear leader? All you need is a nuke.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoThats another differentiator though. Most dangerous tech is more a "temptation to misuse" rather than a largely unusable (but effective) threat to wave around like a nuke or a biological WMD.
- ianburrell 4y agoOne thing is that is easy to develop an inefficient atomic bomb. It is harder to develop one small enough to be delivered and/or thermonuclear bomb. Also, acquiring the material has always been the hard part. It requires nuclear reactors then reprocessing the waste to get plutonium. Or enriching uranium to get U-235. There is term, nuclear latency, for countries that could easily develop nuclear weapons. Some identified ones are Japan, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Australia, Argentina, South Korea, and Taiwan. Japan is special case with 50 tons of plutonium.
- Vecr 4y agoHow about Canada? At one point I'm pretty sure they could have done it quickly, but have they lost capability?
- jszymborski 4y agoCanada is the second largest supplier of Uranium if my memory serves me. It also has few CANDU reactors. If the article is correct in that a couple of physics grad students could make a design in the 60s that could be made in an average machine shop, im sure its the case Canada retains the ability. Not sure our economy wouldnt collapse as a result though.
- southernplaces7 4y agoCanada could very easily produce nuclear weapons, even at scale, if it wanted to. The U.S. would likely even help them in doing so if the government requested the assistance. As you say, it's one of the worlds main suppliers of uranium, already possesses highly advanced nuclear technology and facilities, and has the institutional know-how to be a nuclear power with low relative cost and minimal external interference. If even South Africa made and (supposedly, see below) tested a nuclear weapon way back in the 70's, many countries today and especially Canada could do so with little economic or technical difficulty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
- ianburrell 4y ago
- ddulaney 4y agoI came away with a very different understanding from the article. > Back in the 50s, there were two schools of thought - that the ideas could be kept secret, and that the material could be locked up. Now? Well, hopefully the materials can still be locked up, but we all have our doubts about that. This experiment showed that designing the bomb was the easy part, but manufacturing is still a challenge. Even today, nuclear nonproliferation is largely about making it hard to acquire enough fissile material to make a weapon. Everything from the structure of anti-nuclear treaties to things like Stuxnet is designed around making it impractical to actually manufacture a nuclear weapon, even if you have the design. > Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to Only if "rapidly" is measured in years to decades in any reasonable scenario.
- FpUser 4y ago>"...making it hard to acquire enough fissile material to make a weapon." Which may stop becoming hard if country like Russia decides thar it has nothing to loose and will start selling.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoRisky move, what do they gain? Like in exchange for war material?
- thfuran 4y agoIf nothing else, allied nuclear powers.
- dilznoofus 4y agoWhich is not small If you have one nuclear weapon, you can probably get away with setting up an enrichment framework to produce more without sweating too much.
- FpUser 4y agoWhat do they risk? More sanctions? They're already there up to their gills
- alexpotato 4y agoThere was a post (I believe here on HN) several years ago about a guy who made improvised weapons in airports using only things that were available in Duty Free aka after you had gone through security. He had all kinds of things: stun guns, flamethrower, club etc. The details are kind of secondary to a point someone made in the comments: "This guy has clearly demonstrated that it's trivial to do all of the things necessary to build these things and take over an airplane. The fact that no one has done so in the past couple years has made me seriously question if: a. anyone is trying (probably not) b. given (a), do we really need all of this security theater?" The original post reminds me of the above.
- ceejayoz 4y agoHonestly, between a) armored cockpit doors and b) the knowledge (both passengers, and pilots) of what happens if you let hijackers into the cockpit, a 9/11 style attack isn't likely to ever happen again.
- BobbyJo 4y agoTrabal knowledge gets forgotten too, just over longer timespans. One day, planes will fly with no one on board having been alive when 9/11 happened. They may not make the same assumptions about intent as adults today do. "Ever" again is a little long to be so sure.
- bsder 4y ago"Tribal knowledge" of airplane hijackings was why 9/11 worked initially. People sat still because a "standard" airplane hijacking meant going to some odd airport while a bunch of "freedom fighters" got their 15 minutes of fame and then everybody on the plane got safely released a week or two later. Once people realized that the 9/11 hijackings instead were suicide runs, the "tribal knowledge" broke and people didn't sit still anymore (see: the fourth plane on 9/11 or the shoe bomber).
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- chasil 4y agoIt's astonishing that the barrier to entry for the Nagasaki weapon is so low. I understood that hundreds of explosives experts were involved in designing the shaped charge that created the compressed plutonium critical mass. Restraining proliferation was simply impossible, if the bar was this low.
- atemerev 4y agoCounter-proliferation is an active process. You have to actively block pathways to building nuclear weapons, and constantly run intelligence operations tracking these.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoThe difficulty in making a nuclear weapon is in making a clean, effective, efficient, and high powered one. Making one with a relatively low yield is really not especially difficult. The principal difficulty is merely obtaining the fissile material. Two hemispheres of accurately machined fissile material, a vacuum pump, some really solid steel tubing, and some TNT will make a bomb.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoThe average engineering shop doesn't have what it takes to safely machine fissile material. It's actually quite hard - unless you don't care about irradiating and poisoning your workers, and possibly risking a squib explosion.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoI think there was a Doomwatch episode that addressed this sort of thing, it didn't go well.
- taneq 4y agoIf you’re trying to build a bootleg nuke in order to actually use it, I’d imagine you might be willing to compromise on workers safety a little.
- RomanPushkin 4y agoAre you saying that in 20-50 years we all gonna be peaceful to each other or nuke the planet? Is that the reason why we're not getting a signal from distant civilizations?
- atemerev 4y agoNot “anyone”, but “a group of nuclear physicists that could validate their designs against knowledgeable people at LANL”. But yes, nuclear weapons design peculiarities and simulations are a sort of my hobby, and a very interesting one.
- tedivm 4y ago> The Laboratory hired three physicists—Dave Dobson, David Pipkorn, and Rob Selden— who recently received their Ph.Ds in physics but had little to no experience with nuclear physics. They went out of their way not to hire people with knowledge of nuclear physics.
- TylerE 4y agoExperience, not knowledge. They’re still physics post docs.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoDoesn't everyone studying for a bachelor's degree in applied physics have to work out things like critical mass and how to avoid premature explosion? At least we did when I was studying for my Applied Physics degree in the mid 70s. It was not regarded as even slightly controversial that we should do so nor that it was especially difficult. It was simply one of the problems set in the nuclear physics course. Of course we didn't go into the same degree of detail as Dobson, Pipkorn, and Selden and our solutions would probably not have been as effective but that was mostly because it was the thought process rather than the ultimate result that was important.
- sroussey 4y agoI had a first year’s physics class where we convinced our professor to walk through how to create a nuclear bomb of the two main types. He was a young physicist at the Manhattan Project and told us stories of that as well… like the worry of igniting the oxygen of the planet’s atmosphere, how he didn’t worry being at blast site but grew concerned the farther he got (but inside dangerous radius), how the guards lost their shit and dropped their guns and ran when it went off (and the physicists cheer and looked at the panels instead of the slit window). Good times.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoLittle did anyone know, Oppenheimer said his famous quote about becoming death in a cheerful, celebratory tone!
- ajkjk 4y agoWell the trick is to ensure that the mass only becomes critical right when you want it to. So -- I imagine -- most of the work in making a working atomic bomb is more about the precisely-controlled explosions that detonate it, not the fission itself.
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y agoGun-type bombs like Little Boy used in Hiroshima are less efficient, but much simpler. Shoot an enriched uranium projectile into an enriched uranium target, such that the combined volume they compress to is supercritical.
- jlg23 4y ago> Selden and Dobson proved that there is enough freely floating information in libraries and on the internet using which any technically-savvy person with the right resources could create an atomic bomb, and this include terrorists. That reminds me of a friend being raided by police some 30+ years ago because he published instructions how to create explosives online. He had copied some texts from a very old book that was not copyrighted anymore and, which he, a minor at that time, found in his public library. Fortunately, he never went to trial for that and his rather scientific parents were pretty understanding.
- mikewarot 4y agoDesigning is one thing... getting the materials is another. I feel like there are pretty good systems in place to monitor and detect that behavior. I, for one, don't wish to democratize access to nuclear weapons. Let's keep it so that only nation states willing to maintain them, have them. Maintenance seems to be about $10,000,000/year.
- dumbotron 4y agoApparently the radioactive boy scout was only identified through a "chance encounter" with police. He only created a superfund site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
- borissk 4y agoWe got extremely lucky that it's super hard to separate the isotopes of uranium and plutonium that can be used to make an A-bomb from the minerals that can be mined on Earth surface. If it was easier to do every dictatorship and every terrorist group like ISIS would build a nuclear arsenal and the biggest remaining city on Earth today would be probably 10,000 people. We got lucky with nuclear chain reaction, but who knows what weapons of mass destruction will become possible with further advances in physics, biology, material science, AI. A discovery that will make it possible for a small group of extremists to destroy the human civilization may be the Great Filter.
- hirundo 4y ago> We got extremely lucky Or the strong anthropic principle is valid.
- leetrout 4y agoI had never heard of this. For anyone else interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle#Variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle#Variants
- 323 4y agoDon't worry, nature compensated and you can instead work on engineering viruses or strong AI if you want to blow up the world.
- dilznoofus 4y agoWhy not just keep a bunch of rats and pump them with filth and antibiotics until it outpaces our known chemistries?
- elzbardico 4y agoWe already do this with cattle and poultry in modern Western intensive farming.
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- credit_guy 4y agoA bit of a logical inconsistency there: > The duo was banned from consulting classified research but anything they produced—diagrams and notes—automatically became classified. [...] Finally, after a presentation at Livermore, a senior researcher named Jim Frank pulled them aside and told them that the experiment was a resounding success. Had it been constructed, Jim told them, it would have made a pretty impressive bang as large as Hiroshima." This does not pass the smell test. People who work with classified information are absolutely paranoid. This Jim Frank guy was very likely not allowed to disclose the result of the experiment to anyone without a clearance, including the "duo".
- anigbrowl 4y agoPeople who work with classified information are absolutely paranoid. In theory, yes. In practice, meh.
- shanebellone 4y ago"In practice, meh." Facts
- im3w1l 4y agoThey probably went through the clearance process, with information only kept from them in order to see how they would fare without it. Evidence consistent with this is that they were allowed to design experiments and get results of them back. So they were given classified info just in a very controlled way.
- euroderf 4y agoI don't suppose they subsequently visited, say, Israel or Pakistan ?
- credit_guy 4y agoYes, but then we wouldn't know about the result. Except if someone was terribly careless with classified information. Or if the "leaked" info was actually a decoy.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThis makes me feel guilty about the atomic spies the US executed. They were labeled as modern day Judases who enabled the cold war, but really weren't much different from any other spy.