I was reading about how countries mark ther munitions, but would the same apply to a nuke. Would they be able definatively determine where the bomb came from if it has already been detonated?
Ground zero would be turned to ashes as would the bomb itself. I do not believe that there would be any material to identify.
If the bomb had a known radiation signature they might be able to narrow down the manufacturer but I am well out of my league on this part. Probably not even the correct phrase.
Jim
Jeez, I am so loathe to offer this since I believe it came from a movie, Clancy’s Sum Of All Fears if I recall, but I’m going to bank on his laborous, dutiful research as being spot. In it, they asserted that any blast will exhibit a telltale atomic signature, rendering the manufacture site unquestionably identifable.
If my faith in his research was overinflated, my sincere apologies.
I recall from old school reports I wrote that atomic weapons only convert a fraction of the fissile material. Here’s a wikipedia link claiming a maximum of 25% for a pure fission weapon (can be “fusion boosted” - whatever that is - to 40%):
This means that the vast majority of the radioactive stuff will be blown all over the place, it won’t be converted to energy or otherwise “vanish”.
Now I don’t know if weapons-grade plutonium or uranium has a distinctive chemical fingerprint that will let you figure out which reactor it came from, but there will be plenty of material to try it on.
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Supposedly all they can tell is where the plutonium or uranium was processed, say sandia or volograd or whatever
The plot of the clancy book sum of all fears, had the Israelis accidently uploading one of their nukes during the 73 war, and the pilot jettisoning it thinking it was napalm or some other weapon, then found by an arab and turned back into a bomb. After the football stadium and a good part of the city was destroyed , the US goverment was able to determine that it was american originally and from what lab and batch, your milage varys according to wether this is actually true fact adapted to a story , or wishful thinking according to clancy.
Who made it really wouldnt matter except for some forensic types, there is more than enough countrys out there that would be convienient to drop the demarche on.
Declan
Clancy is right on this one.
There are multiple signatures of origin that can be detected both before and after detonation. Radiochemistry can identify isotopes and trace elements present and these can be matched to known sources. Characteristic signs of material aging give additional information on provenance, along with more traditional forensic methods. There’s a book on this, Nuclear Forensic Analysis, on Amazon, for the interested.
From what I’ve read, they can determine the source of the fissile material and the design of the weapon by isotopic analysis of the fallout. Techniques for doing this were highly developed during the era of above-ground testing. Both for testing our own weapons and figuring out what other nuclear-capable states were doing.
Clancy’s book also highlights the problem in doing this… you may identify the original source for the nuclear, but that might just get you to “country formerly known as U.S.S.R.”, which doesn’t do you much good.
I would also expect the bad guys who built and detonated the bomb to use stolen fissile material if they could, to implicate their enemies and thus make U.S. retaliation against the wrong country/stateless entity/NGO more likely.
I hope to God we never have to find out the answer to this question in real life.
It was Iran.
Wait, was this hypothetical?
Essentially, you’re looking at the ratios or proportions between two or more isotopes. Every reactor (and indeed, specific set of fuel elements and segment of the reactor) will have a slightly different but measurable ratio of various isotopes and resultant daughter products.
Could you use this to determine where the bomb material came from? It depends; the consistancy should be accurate, even with a small number of samples, but if you don’t know the ratios for the hypothetical reactor in question (either from direct access to data, or from previous fallout measurements taken from atmospheric testing) then all you can tell is where it didn’t come from. In the Clancy novel in question, the material comes from a U.S. nuclear weapon material plant (Savannah River, if my memory serves) and one of the technicians doing the analysis happened to have done his thesis on nuclear isotope ratios of weapons grade product.
We should be able to discriminate between American material, Soviet material (because their reactors used significantly different designs and refinement processes) and “other”. Presumably we have informatiton on French material from their extensive testing, and have information shared from the British, and possible material recovered from Chinese tests. With other nations like India, Pakistan, Israel, et cetera, who have entirely independent operations for producing and refining weapons grade material, we might be able to make some educated guesses but it’s unlikely that we’d be capable of pinpointing the source. And these are, in fact, the most likely sources from which nuclear weapon material used by a “rogue” third party might be acquired, either by deliberate sale or by theft, owing to a lack of safeguards.
So the answer to the O.P.'s question is a qualified maybe. And even if we can, it doesn’t follow that the producing party is responsible, even proximately, for the resulting explosion.
Stranger
It’d be hard for me to add anything better than Stranger On A Train and illoe have already, but when has that ever stopped me? Many years ago, I got into a long discussion about nuclear terrorism with someone who taught my NBC course. It was in the O-mess over a table full of $1 beers, but as I recall, he asserted that there were even plans in place for immediately back-tracking nuclear events to their source. This was before the fall of the USSR, so I don’t know if plans have changed, but it’s possible that there are still established procedures for this.
Could it really be discovered, or would a government simply accuse the most likely suspect and lie that they had proof in order to get the party to confess.
Sandia doesn’t process weapons grade plutonium or uranium. They do weapons design, research, and development. They also manufacture weapon components, but not the actual pits.