Side note, perhaps, but does a nuclear weapon have to be either modern or reliable to be useful? I’d argue it certainly needn’t be modern - the Hiroshima weapon was astonishingly crude compared to modern devices, but killed lots of people perfectly well. As for reliable - well, let’s say I’m a rogue state with six nukes, each of which only has a one in five chance of detonating successfully. Wouldn’t you still find that a considerable deterrent?
There’s a huge gap between science (what a physics prof knows) and engineering (what a nuclear bomb engineer knows). This isn’t limited to nuclear devices. A typical prof can’t necessarily make a functioning device, any more than an engineer knows all the science of how his products work and how that theory was developed.
The prof knows the underlying theory well enough to teach it, along with a mass of info that is uninteresting to the engineer.
The engineer knows the theory well enough to apply it, along with a mass of details that are uninteresting to the prof.
To add to this, H-bombs are more like rockets than say, toasters. Rockets and H-bombs require a substantial amount of interdisciplanary work, where experts in a number of fields have to work together to figure out how everything works together.
A fission bomb is considerably simpler, and dramatically simpler if you don’t care what the yeild is. If you’re not fussy about the yield, just grab two hunks of uranium and throw them at each other. The problem is that, as the hunks approach each other, they start to go critical, and the energy from that blasts them apart. Is that success? Not really. There’s a lot of both theory and practical knowledge that go into overcoming that basic problem.
One of our bigger fears is a “dirty bomb”, which is essentially a poorly designed fission bomb that, rather than having power, instead spreads radioactive material over a wide area. Wild guessing here, but I bet a half-decent dirty bomb wouldn’t be that hard for one person to mastermind; obtaining the materials is probably the higher bar.
You have a point. I was simply stating that no one person could successfully design and manufacture a nuclear weapon like the ones stored in our current inventory, for what it’s worth.
Well, I was thinking about the Nth Country Experiment alluded to above. The only constraints on our theoretical (heh) prof are that the design be an H-bomb and that he doesn’t have access to classified info. He also doesn’t have to build it, just design it and be confident it will work. It also doesn’t have to fly or even be transportable. It doesn’t have to reach the theoretical yield for the amount of material, but is should at least be capable of a KT. (What defines a fizzle anyway?)
Rob
Do you know the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb?
I assume part of the “atomic scientist” job was quantifiying the effects of the chain reaction - it will happen thus fast, so to overcome that tendency to fly apart (and produce a fizzled reactio dirty bomb) you need a good grasp on how decent an explosive power need to be applied to maximize yield. the high-level concept is available anywhere. the details are not as simple.
Recall, for example, that there was a kerfuffle over Sadam Hussein trying to acquire triggers - which, if I read between the lines correctly, was the necessary explosive triggers (capacitor-driven blasting caps?) to ensure all sections of the explosive compression happened sufficiently simultaneously that the compression was even and timed right? Seems explosive engineering is one of many disciplines needed to make a useful weapon.
Yes.
The triggers in question were krytrons? Aren’t they off-the-shelf parts?
Thanks,
Rob
A key point not mentioned yet is that “average physics professor” is about as meaningful here as “average American” is in other contexts. There is a wide spread in physics subfields and specialties. The broadest aspect of this is that a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist are nearly different species, especially at the extremes. A string theorist has no reason to have any engineering skills beyond that of any other very smart person, and actually I posit an anticorrelation in practice. On the other hand, subfields of physics that involve frequent design and construction of precision instrumentation and experimental equipment will involve physicists with real engineering knowledge. A experimental plasma physicist, a quantum information theorist, an experimentalist working on low-energy direct-detection techniques for dark matter, … Each will have a unique skill set for that subfield.
If you limit yourself to, say, the 20% most appropriate categories of physicist, I have no doubt that many could (with appropriate resources provided) design something that would go boom due to fission, and a non-negligible number could make something where inefficient fusion contributes to the boom. If you want a small or light or efficient or reliable or mass producible or cheap design, then the “appropriate resources” had better include an engineering team.
United States v. The Progressive is an interesting case along these lines: United States v. Progressive, Inc. - Wikipedia