No. In order to get a significant nuclear reaction in a bomb you have to maintain critical mass for a non-trivial amount of time. It’s not enough to just assemble the critical mass and squirt some neutrons into it to start the chain reaction. You have to hold the reaction mass together long enough for a substantial fraction of the atoms to take part in the cascading fissile chain. Without some sort of confinement the bomb will blow itself apart with most of the atoms unsplit – a fizzle.
Modern weapons use inertial confinement. They create a spherical shockwave with conventional explosives to compress the reaction mass and hold it together long enough for a long chain reaction to occur.
That’s why a uranium outer casing won’t make much difference in a bomb’s yield. Because the outer casing doesn’t have any sort of confinement the moment a nuclear reaction begins in the casing it will blow itself apart, terminating the chain. In fact it’s unlikely a chain reaction would begin in the casing at all. The initial conventional explosive blast would probably disintegrate the casing long before any neutrons from the bomb’s core could reach it.
Shouldn’t someone named **Enola Straight ** already know all this?
I half-remembered from an old Time/Life educational book using a Uranium bomb casing around an H-Bomb was a cheap, albeit dirty, way of boosting the power of said nuke.
I’m not sure, but you may be remembering something about two-stage and three-stage devices(if I remember the terminology correctly). These, though, do not use depleted uranium. They use weapons grade uranium.
Well, it does have something to do with nuclear weapons, in so far as it’s a by-product of bomb making (which we would do anyway), which makes it cheap enough to be practical for use in armor, shells, etc. But it’s exactly the wrong kind of uranium to try to make a bomb out of: You’d have much better luck with pitchblend dug straight out of the earth.
While I don’t think that a 10-kiloton conventional explosive has ever been used as a weapon, there probably have been conventional explosions that big before. I think that the explosion of the Soviet N-1 rocket might have been up in that range. But we do have (or at least, had) nukes weaker than 10 ktons, though.
Ah, if you’re talking H-bombs it’s an entirely different story. The dynamics of a fusion reaction are very different than the dynamics of a fission reaction.
However, as far as I am aware the low-yield “battlefield nukes” are all purely fission devices.
Kips, kTs…it’s only a two and a half magnitude difference. :rolleyes: That’ll teach me to deal with units after half a bottle of wine.
My egregious lapse of attention to units aside, the effects of a nuclear weapon will be more extensive and certainly have greater long-term impact than comperable yield conventional device.
I read that the British developed a very heavy (conventional) bomb in WWII-it was a 2 ton monster designed to penetrate abut 20 foot into the earth, before exploding. The idea was to knock buildings down. Was it very effective at this? And, was it cost-effective? I can’t imagine that carrying just one bomb was a good way to empliy a Lancaster!
