Talk:Nuclear weapon design

Are you all insane?

Are you all fucking insane?

What ultimate stupidity has caused you to post instructions for building nuclear bombs on the internet? Don't we have enough trouble with regular bombs in the hands of terrorists now, do we actually have to tell them all how to make bigger holes in humanity?

Please consider removing this wiki. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.166.15.115 (talk • contribs) 15:53, 11 May 2011

All the information here is already available readily in many books and other internet sites. None is original. The only thing that stops terrorists from building bombs is availability of fissile material, not the know-how to make bombs once you have it, which is (by comparison) trivial (every single nation that has built a bomb, once it had the fissile material, has succeeded on its FIRST test-- that's how easy it is). Why don't you read the article itself, and learn something about it, instead of wringing your hands? SBHarris 16:07, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

How do we know they succeeded on the first test? Likely those that don't succeed don't say much about it. Gah4 (talk) 23:33, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

...and/or read Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears". It's not considered horror. SkoreKeep (talk) 03:55, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

References

Explosive Testing

The citation to the effect that computing power is not great enough to simulate the detonation sequence of nuclear bombs is from 2000. The computational power that exists now, especially that which the national labs can make use of, is so much greater than it once was that the Monte Carlo approach has become the most widely-accepted method for criticality tests. And, compared to full-size power reactors, bombs are relatively simple to model in computers. Unfortunately, I don't have citations to back this up beyond personal experience, but it may be worthwhile to find more recent information to this effect. IRSpeshul (talk) 16:33, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

I suppose it depends on how close you want to simulate. Turbulence in 3D is very difficult, even for the biggest compute farms now. (It is used to simulate a core-collapse super-nova, for example.) The 1D (spherical symmetry) calculation is much simpler, but also misses much physics. Gah4 (talk) 23:39, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Cobalt bomb section confusing

The section Cobalt bomb is a little confusing. The section starts out describing the device as "A fictional doomsday bomb" which would lead casual readers to regard it as fictional, yet the article says they were seriously investigated and possibly built and tested. The comparison of radiation produced by fission products to cobalt-60 after a nuclear explosion is inadequately described - is this from a putative cobalt bomb? Thanks. --Chetvorno^TALK 20:12, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

In the case of fission products many decay, and their daughter nuclides decay, in seconds, minutes, or hours. Sr-90 and Cs-137 have half lives in tens of years, and so are the dominant radioactivity after a few years. The cobalt bomb intentionally creates a large amount of Co-60 with about a five year half life. That makes it the dominant radioactive nuclide for some years, and much more radioactive than the Sr-90 and Cs-137 for many years. As far as is known, none have been built. Gah4 (talk) 03:11, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Energy loss

There is the statement The charged fragments' high electric charge causes many inelastic collisions with nearby nuclei. Seems to me that the energy loss is more from interacting with electrons than inelastic nuclei, but I could be wrong. Anyone know about this? Gah4 (talk) 21:45, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

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Stage counting

The neutrons released by fusion will fission U-238. This U-238 fission reaction produces most of the energy in a typical two-stage thermonuclear weapon. Not sure how they count the stages, but wouldn't a fission-fusion-fission bomb be three stages? Gah4 (talk) 23:43, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Implosion ...

One of the things that always bother me with that topic is the use of the word "implosion" where I would really think that "compression" would be the proper term. Now I fully understand that every area of human activity has its own language and for me a kilobyte will always be 1024 Bytes, but here I think that the unprepared reader should get a short explanation/correction inserted into all the (incredibly detailed) explanations. If it's not clear what I mean ... If you have a vessel with a vacuum inside (like an oldfashioned tube TV) and that vessel colapses inwards we have an implosion ... where as compression is usually used when high outside pressure crushes something. Of course it's basically the same thing - the indide pressure is lower than the outside pressure. Only the "unusual" pressure is different: implosion - low inside pressure / compression - high outside pressure ... So I would use "implosion" in the case where the fissle materials were actually sucked together instead of pressed together ... Just a thought ... JB. --84.186.134.5 (talk) 01:38, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

As well as I know, the original idea was a hollow sphere, and that is when it was named. After the high spontaneous fission rate of plutonium was discovered, such that the gun design wouldn't work, implosion work increased. It was later found that a solid sphere, instead of a hollow one, works best, but the method wasn't renamed. Even so, it was usual to use misleading terms for security reasons. I only recently learned that the barn was named, not as a joke, but for secrecy reasons. Gah4 (talk) 02:11, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Implosion means compression driven by a convergent detonation of a high explosive shell. The term "implosion" is intended to convey that the detonation drives material inwards and to distinguish from an "explosion" that disperses material outwards. NPguy (talk) 22:47, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Units?

The Fat Man device specifically used 13.6 lb (6.2 kg), about 12 US fl oz or 350 ml in volume) It seems wrong to use a liquid volume unit for Pu. Gah4 (talk) 02:17, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Both mL and (counterintuitively) fl oz are measurements of volume in general, not just fluids. I think it is helpful to the reader for them to be able to picture the volume taken by the 6.2 kg of Pu. VQuakr (talk) 00:30, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

I suppose so. As far as I know, it should be mL for liquids, and $cm^{3}$ for solids, but then everyone knows that they are the same. And $in^{3}$ for solids, and fluid ounces for liquids, but it could be that U.S. people can imagine the volume easier in fluid ounces than in $in^{3}$. In recipes, butter and sifted flour are more like liquids than solids. I wasn't actually suggesting changing it, but just wondering. Thanks. Gah4 (talk) 04:11, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

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Intro needs a severe prune

A good start would be to trim back each of the bulleted types to a sentence or two. - Snori (talk) 08:42, 3 October 2018 (UTC)