Talk:Swan (nuclear primary)

Two Point detonation delay

It was in the newspapers in the last couple of years that the Iranians were testing a two-point nuclear ignition system. News reports stated that earthquake detectors detected the tests, and the giveaway signature that it was a two-point nuclear test was that the two explosions were a fraction of a second one-after-the-other. Apparently, the way this system works is that the two detonators do not ignite at exactly the same time - they have to be precision-spaced one-after-the-other. Since the Iranians and everybody in the industry already know this, could somebody who knows about this please explain why the detonations are not/should not/cannot be at the same time. Thanks in advance to anybody who knows.Betathetapi545 (talk) 09:12, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Never heard of such. I thought it might have been a single-point failure test, but that only has meaning when there is real stuff between the detonators, and Iran, AFAIK, doesn't yet. Do you have a cite for that news report? SkoreKeep (talk) 21:48, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

I just reviewed the news reports (this is a typical one: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/05/iran-tested-nuclear-warhead-design) and I think I might have read more into the reports than what is there. If Iran did a two-point implosion test, then how would seismic detectors detect that there were two separate detonations if they both occurred at the same moment and were only a couple of feet away from each other? I therefore assumed that a two-point implosion requires detonations slightly off from each other. I am not a nuclear physicist. Thanks in advance.Betathetapi545 (talk) 06:45, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Unless the Iranians have developed a very unconventionally shaped (and unheard of, and probably impossible) device, the detonators must go off at the same time, usually with sub-microsecond accuracy, if not nanosecond (ie: within a very small fraction of the time it takes a hypervelocity shockwave to travel the radius of the device). It is *not* "known in the industry" that the detonators must go off "one after the other". If it was a safety test, they may have deliberately miss-timed the detonators. However, the largest feasible time seperation of detonations would be the time it takes the shockwave to traverse the diameter of the device, which would be on the order of microseconds - it is hard to see how two detonators going off attached to the same mass of explosive could be determined via seismology. If the detonations were seperated by more than a few microseconds, it means that there were two discrete devices present - for it to be the same device, it would mean that during the explosion of several tens-to-hundreds of kilograms of hi-explosive, a second detonator (consisting of a few grams of explosive) going off was detected *mid-explosion*. I strongly suspect that whatever media it was that was reporting simply made an inexpert, off-the-cuff assumption.178.15.151.163 (talk) 08:44, 5 May 2016 (UTC)