3 ms·

As is the case in many fields, designing != building. For example I ride bikes. A friend of mine designed a bike for me. But since neither of us could (at th

As is the case in many fields, designing != building. For example I ride bikes. A friend of mine designed a bike for me. But since neither of us could (at the time) weld, I had to pay someone else to assemble it. Just because you can design a bomb that would work doesn't mean you'd have the ability to actually build it. Even if you were given refined uranium (and that's 80% of the job) there's still quite a lot of work to tolerance everything correctly, machine it all without killing yourself, assemble it, procure the primary explosives, put together a precise enough detonation system to allow the chain reaction to happen and then build a system to trigger the detonation. All of that is no joke.

rtkwe 13y ago
The complexity really depends on the design. There are 2 basic types for a fission bomb; cannon and implosion. By far the simplest is the cannon which is pretty much as simple as taking a cannon and firing one lump into another. Implosion is trickier but only really because you have to get the timing of the explosions right to get good compression. The tricky part is enriching the Uranium. The better your enriching process is the easier it is to make a bomb because the material is closer to critical.
khuey 13y ago
No, getting a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium is 99.9% of the job. It's pretty easy to fashion a crude nuclear weapon once you have sufficiently high quantity of fissile material.
alan_cx 13y ago
All I know is what I read in Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears, which has a hell of a lot of detail about building a nuclear bomb. The thing that struck me was all the very high precision machining required, and how hard that was to achieve. As you suggest, design principle, easy, actually engineering it is the tricky bit.
- wtracy 13y ago
  Plutonium is harder to machine that other metals, as it's density tends to be non-uniform: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Allotropes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Allotropes You go along milling a hard spot, then hit a soft spot and--oops! You took off too much.
VLM 13y ago
And your bike example is given ready to manipulate refined materials. Its a much bigger problem if you're given a mountain containing some coal and some iron ore and told good luck. Oh and when you're done with that, to paint it, here's some land where you could probably dig an oil well and build a refinery and a complete petrochemical industry. I've been interested in this topic for a long time and it seems the biggest non-obvious problems relate to the initiator design.

rtkwe 13y ago

The complexity really depends on the design. There are 2 basic types for a fission bomb; cannon and implosion. By far the simplest is the cannon which is pretty much as simple as taking a cannon and firing one lump into another. Implosion is trickier but only really because you have to get the timing of the explosions right to get good compression. The tricky part is enriching the Uranium. The better your enriching process is the easier it is to make a bomb because the material is closer to critical.

khuey 13y ago

No, getting a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium is 99.9% of the job. It's pretty easy to fashion a crude nuclear weapon once you have sufficiently high quantity of fissile material.

alan_cx 13y ago

All I know is what I read in Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears, which has a hell of a lot of detail about building a nuclear bomb. The thing that struck me was all the very high precision machining required, and how hard that was to achieve. As you suggest, design principle, easy, actually engineering it is the tricky bit.

wtracy 13y ago
Plutonium is harder to machine that other metals, as it's density tends to be non-uniform: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Allotropes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Allotropes You go along milling a hard spot, then hit a soft spot and--oops! You took off too much.

VLM 13y ago

And your bike example is given ready to manipulate refined materials. Its a much bigger problem if you're given a mountain containing some coal and some iron ore and told good luck. Oh and when you're done with that, to paint it, here's some land where you could probably dig an oil well and build a refinery and a complete petrochemical industry. I've been interested in this topic for a long time and it seems the biggest non-obvious problems relate to the initiator design.