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I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb - has also been carried out? How the Teller-Ulam design works has been public for a

I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb - has also been carried out? How the Teller-Ulam design works has been public for a long time...

Synaesthesia 3y ago
Yeah but don’t you need a lot of lithium deuteride, and some tritium, which is not that easy to make. But it’s been done by at least 5 countries, including China, India, North Korea … But the Teller Ulam designs are never complete, always redacted, obviously. You still gotta reverse engineer it.
- arethuza 3y ago
  Well I guess that latter point is my real question - what would happen if you took one of the diagrams and the associated descriptions from something like "Dark Sun" and simply built it - what would happen?
  - lumost 3y ago
    There are critical details which can be overlooked in the declassified documents which effect everything from yield to whether the bomb works or not. Examples. - initiators in fission devices - explosive lenses in fission devices (what’s the exact mix/shape/required explosive payload? - large scale manufacture of high grade plutonium. What’s the exact effect of plutonium purity on yield/function? - how effective of a reflector is required for the teller ullman design? What’s the effect of manufacturing error on the ellipses? There are more, but any one of these questions would require time, money, and expertise to resolve.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      The Ivy Mike device (apart from the primary) didn't sound like it required huge precision - I'm sure "Dark Sun" refers to the radiation case being filled with expanded polystyrene held in place by copper nails hammered into place.
      - George83728 3y ago
        The Ivy Mike device used cryogenic liquid deuterium instead of solid lithium-6 hydride, so the secondary was very different from any sort of practical hydrogen bomb. Maybe the tolerances were looser for the Ivy Mike device, maybe not, but I wouldn't draw many conclusions from it.
        lumost 3y ago
        Ivy Mike was also a much larger experimental apparatus. In addition to liquid deuterium cooling, it's possible the designers used other mechanisms to relax tolerances such as. 1. Using a much larger fission yield then necessary 2. Using a much larger/denser elispes than necessary to avoid manufacturing errors becoming problematic. 3. Using a much more massive reflector than necessary. The goal of the Ivy Mike test was to validate the concept of the design - not necessarily to validate that it could be made into a practical bomb. I'm not sure if its ever been revealed wether the filler for the shell has any significance towards the final device.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Are you hiring machinists to build it, or are you hiring some engineers and physicists to design a bomb based on that design. Building according to the plans - we can assume some important details are left out, or sabotaged so that it looks like it will work but it won't. However engineers and physicists can start with those plans and run calculations/simulations/tests to figure out what will go wrong and then figure out something to make it work.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      What I meant was following the same kind of exercise described in the article but for an thermonuclear weapon rather than a fission device - excluding the primary component.
localplume 3y ago
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rtkwe 3y ago
There are a lot more hurdles to making a proper thermo-nuclear bomb. Implosion type bombs which form the initial boost of Teller-Ulam designs are much more complex to implement because the explosive shell needs to be set off simultaneously so that it properly crushes the fissile material.
trasz4 3y ago
>I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb And then there's the theoretical possibility of designing a thermonuclear device without the A-bomb part. I remember skimming through a paper from someone from CERN about it; https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071.pdf is the guy, but I'm not sure that's the exact paper.

I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb - has also been carried out? How the Teller-Ulam design works has been public for a long time...

Synaesthesia 3y ago

Yeah but don’t you need a lot of lithium deuteride, and some tritium, which is not that easy to make. But it’s been done by at least 5 countries, including China, India, North Korea … But the Teller Ulam designs are never complete, always redacted, obviously. You still gotta reverse engineer it.

arethuza 3y ago
Well I guess that latter point is my real question - what would happen if you took one of the diagrams and the associated descriptions from something like "Dark Sun" and simply built it - what would happen?
- lumost 3y ago
  There are critical details which can be overlooked in the declassified documents which effect everything from yield to whether the bomb works or not. Examples. - initiators in fission devices - explosive lenses in fission devices (what’s the exact mix/shape/required explosive payload? - large scale manufacture of high grade plutonium. What’s the exact effect of plutonium purity on yield/function? - how effective of a reflector is required for the teller ullman design? What’s the effect of manufacturing error on the ellipses? There are more, but any one of these questions would require time, money, and expertise to resolve.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    The Ivy Mike device (apart from the primary) didn't sound like it required huge precision - I'm sure "Dark Sun" refers to the radiation case being filled with expanded polystyrene held in place by copper nails hammered into place.
    - George83728 3y ago
      The Ivy Mike device used cryogenic liquid deuterium instead of solid lithium-6 hydride, so the secondary was very different from any sort of practical hydrogen bomb. Maybe the tolerances were looser for the Ivy Mike device, maybe not, but I wouldn't draw many conclusions from it.
      - lumost 3y ago
        Ivy Mike was also a much larger experimental apparatus. In addition to liquid deuterium cooling, it's possible the designers used other mechanisms to relax tolerances such as. 1. Using a much larger fission yield then necessary 2. Using a much larger/denser elispes than necessary to avoid manufacturing errors becoming problematic. 3. Using a much more massive reflector than necessary. The goal of the Ivy Mike test was to validate the concept of the design - not necessarily to validate that it could be made into a practical bomb. I'm not sure if its ever been revealed wether the filler for the shell has any significance towards the final device.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Are you hiring machinists to build it, or are you hiring some engineers and physicists to design a bomb based on that design. Building according to the plans - we can assume some important details are left out, or sabotaged so that it looks like it will work but it won't. However engineers and physicists can start with those plans and run calculations/simulations/tests to figure out what will go wrong and then figure out something to make it work.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    What I meant was following the same kind of exercise described in the article but for an thermonuclear weapon rather than a fission device - excluding the primary component.

localplume 3y ago

[dead]

rtkwe 3y ago

There are a lot more hurdles to making a proper thermo-nuclear bomb. Implosion type bombs which form the initial boost of Teller-Ulam designs are much more complex to implement because the explosive shell needs to be set off simultaneously so that it properly crushes the fissile material.

trasz4 3y ago

>I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb And then there's the theoretical possibility of designing a thermonuclear device without the A-bomb part. I remember skimming through a paper from someone from CERN about it; https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071.pdf is the guy, but I'm not sure that's the exact paper.