With my blessings Sir!
(Note to self: do NOT argue with the guy with atomic powered nuclear armed coffee. Just nod, smile, and back out of the room slowly.)
please plan to make better use of your afterlife. 
You haven’t half-lived until you’ve had a piping hot cup of Up and Atom! breakfast blend from TripCo Industries. It’s sure to blast your morning off! Try our daughter products: our special decaffeinated blend, “Fizzle,” and our new line of insulated mugs for your brew’s containment vessel!
Tripler
Okay, okay, sorry for the hijack–couldn’t resist.
I’ve heard Up and Atom! is really finicky about adding enough coffee to the pot… Thankfully it doesn’t seem to be as sensitive to brewing temperature, like other coffees, unless you’re doing a multistage brew like with a Moka Pot or the like.
I find the Moka Pot really fuses the disparate coffee flavors together, into a much larger taste. Really a giant explosion of flavor in your mug.
Here’s two product items for your consideration.
- Containment vessel. Be sure to look at the whole slideshow.
- Fuel.
Happy mornings*! You’re welcome. 
* Sunrise! On my mark! Three … Two … One …
::snerk:: That’s pretty cool . . .
"Store in a cool dry place.’ What, like the WIPP?
Tripler
The NNSS needs a good coffee joint.
I’d save Fizzle for your line of caffeine-free fizzy soft drinks. Decaf coffee ideas are No Blow Joe or the Muddy Dud fer yer Mug.
Look in the pastry case for some yellowcake.
At the cream & sugar station they also have a shaker full of neutrons. Just don’t shake in too many too hard too fast. You might trigger a boil-over.
I don’t think this is entirely right. Ed Teller apparently had a workable design for a 10-gigaton bomb (cite). I can’t find the weight in my sources, but Teller lobbied hard for it, and I don’t think he’d have stuck his neck out if he didn’t think it was deliverable.
The reason it was never produced (apart from the obvious problems with global contamination and genocide) is the realization that we can upscale bomb yields very well, but we can’t really upscale transmission of energy to the target.
In other words: to maximize the terrain’s exposure to the energy, you need to detonate that bomb as a certain high altitude. But at that high altitude, the atmosphere is too thin to transmit the overpressure wave. So there’s really no theoretical limit to bomb yield, but a monster bomb like that achieves nothing but spending a billion dollars to send a warm cloud of radioactive waste into space (and back down to earth, on your own head, a few months thereafter).
I didn’t get that jist from the article: straight in the first paragraph it leads me to believe he was all about designing weapons, but delivery was an afterthought. . . From the article:
The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.”
I read ‘backyard’ as “put this idea on the back burner” or “someone else will figure it out.” Even nowadays, in any given industry (even here) there are folks that can design [insert product here] well, but they completely miss the point of making things user friendly or deployable.
I posit that reason it was never produced was due to several factors:
- It was so large, that then-existing platforms (read: bombers) could not deliver it;
- It was politically unpalatable;
- The proposed design was for ‘shock value’, to wit:
-When Teller met with the GAC, he also pushed for smaller bombs, but he thought there was still plenty of room on the high end of the scale. To be fair, Teller was probably feeling somewhat wounded: Livermore’s one H-bomb design at Castle had been a dud, and the AEC had cancelled another one of his designs that was based on the same principle. So he did what only Edward Teller could do: he tried to raise the ante, to be the bold idea man. Cancel my H-bomb? How about this: he proposed a 10,000 megaton design.
-Per Dr Rabi: "Don’t listen to Teller, he’s just trying to rile you." Edward Teller: trolling the GAC.
-It’s hard not to wonder what motivates a man to make bigger and bigger and bigger bombs. Was it a genuine feeling that it would increase American or world security? Or was it just ambition? I’m inclined to see it as the latter, personally: a desire to push the envelope, to push for the bigger impact, the biggest boom — even into the territory of the dangerously absurd, the realm of self-parody. Bolding by Tripler to emphasize points.
There are some personalities that legitimately like to come up with designs to exhibit possibilities and push envelopes, or purely for ego-inflationary reasons. There are also some other personalities that come up with good ideas, but lack the ‘common sense’ factor.
For example*, on a side project I work on, a physicist came up with a device to perform a specific, in-the-field task for EOD folks. Along with the design came a 22-page manual for field assembly. I respectfully pointed out to said physicist that it took 30 minutes just to assemble this thing; had far too delicate parts to be bouncing around in a truck/rucksack; and there were already field-survivable, powered tools that could be assembled in 5 minutes and accomplish the same specific, in-the-field task. Said physicist did not ‘camp happy’ after our private discussion, but ultimately came 'round to acknowledge my thoughts. * An unclassified example, for a public message board, to demonstrate a singular point.
Bottom line: I hear you, but larger yields ultimately require a corresponding physical size, and something in the gigaton range (or even multi-megaton range) would be large and heavy enough to bump up against an airliners’ capacity. I’m sure Teller had a design, but I don’t think it was a practical one.
Tripler
Got a better design for a coffee machine? Cool! It’s the size of a laser printer? Not so cool.
I think that “backyard” as a delivery mechanism means that you build it in your backyard, and then that’s where you set it off, because there’s no way it’s ever going anywhere else.
At my previous place of employment we had a coffee machine that was larger than a laser printer, and more expensive (a fancy espresso rig with levers and dials and everything). It was this one, and it was in fact very cool. It was more machine than circumstances demanded, but it suited management’s goal of signaling that they wanted us caffeinated in comfort and style.
We’re never going to know the actual weight of a live gigaton warhead with today’s tech, full stop. That’s the only way this dispute gets resolved. But I find it hard to believe Teller would have made such noise about a weapon that was entirely outside the feasible delivery range. You and I can’t know exactly how such a weapon would play out with modern technology, but it is fact that nuclear weapons miniaturization has come a long, long way since the Tsar days. Perhaps Teller foresaw this.
Oooh, that is fancy! Granted, I’ve accepted a level of survival where your morning coffee is the stick of ‘instant’ in your shirt pocket. War is hell . . .
I think we could ballpark it, based on physics; but I’m not gonna do that on a public message board. And I don’t think we have a dispute per se, just a professional, academic difference of opinions.
You are correct that nuclear weapons have historically gotten smaller, and more compact in physical sizes while preserving yield. I can agree with your point that Teller hedged his bets that his physics designs would be implementable with future technology (in package and delivery systems), “The science is solid–the engineering will catch up.” But I still think he then was selling an idea just to sell an idea.
I still hold fast to the point that we do know how such a weapon would play out with modern politics though.
Tripler
Agree to disagree, but I’ll clink my coffee mug with you!
and the section immediately above pretty well covers what the public knows about such things.
IMO … As hard as it is to have the second stage function correctly adjacent to the rapidly expanding first stage fireball in current real-world weapons, building additional stages such that the 3rd, 4th, and 5th stages survive long enough to do their thing; Aye, there’s the rub.
Teller may well have believed that those practical problems of interstage survival would be surmountable in the near future. I suspect, with no technical knowledge, that he was being optimistic at best.
I had the “privilege” of hearing Teller speak in person to a group of about 50 of us at my engineering college in 1977. He would have been 69 or 70, but seemed to be about 80.
He came across as somebody who’d totally imbibed his own legend and who had never met a problem that a nuclear explosion would not improve. It was not a good look. Doubtless a brilliant scientist in his day, but by then he seemed more of an eccentric crank.
“When you merely wish to bury bombs, there is no limit to the size. After that, they are connected to a gigantic complex of computers…”
As I read things, even in LeMay’s heyday, nobody wanted to initiate a genocide that might scald half a continent and contaminate most of the northern hemisphere. Even if you solved for design and deliverability, there’s just no good place to deploy it except maybe some novel ideas about digging a very, very deep mine beneath your adversary. Which would be… interesting to say the least.
Two points on the gigaton warhead. First, just by looking at the Ted Taylor quote I mentioned above, you get a ~165-170,000 kg weight for a gigaton 2-stage device. I suspect multiple fusion stages—which are ‘just an engineering problem’, LOL—shrink that size appreciably. Fusion gets more energy per unit of mass than fission does, and a bit of the yield from big thermonuclear devices were from fast neutrons fissioning U-238. Use them to heat and compress additional fusion stages, OTOH, and I would guess the yield efficiency goes up considerably.
Second, I had though that Teller never intended such a giant device to be mobile? Rather it was to be salted with elements that yielded nasty radioactive isotopes upon neutron activation, and was intended to poison large chunks of Earth’s biosphere. Sort of like the Gadsden Flag meme with the snake holding a hand grenade, and the caption, “F–k with me, and I’ll kill us all.”
The cobalt-salted bombs weren’t Teller’s idea. That came from Leo Szilard. He intended his ideas as a warning, not for military application. As one might have expected, the lunatic LeMay wanted to run with it and was (I guess) eventually shut down.
During the Korean War, North Korea had not committed any offense comparable to nuking DC, yet we waged a campaign of strategic bombing that reduced the country to rubble and killed an estimated two million people, almost entirely civilians, according to statistician Matthew White, self-described “atrocitologist.” One American colonel who was captured and transported north said it looked like the surface of the moon, and he saw no intact buildings.
I do not pretend to predict our reaction to our capital being nuked, but I have no confidence it would be proportionate or morally examined.