Well you said or implied that lack of computers slowed down the process. I mostly disagreed with that statement.
If you read Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman, he talks about working in the computation area at Los Alamos. They didn’t have computers, but they did have programmable calculators, and they ran calculations that took weeks. Having computers would have significantly shortened the time needed to build the first bomb, although the critical path was the acquisition of enough fissile material.
BTW, Oak Ridge is an odd town. Because it was a sort of Army base to start it has no real downtown at all. It was enclosed by a huge fence until the 50s when the fences came down and it turned into a regular town. Of course the secret stuff is still behind fences even now.
Like this?
It’d be quite a suitcase (more like a big duffel bag). Evidently only the US and the USSR ever had the technology to make 'em that small. There are people who make their own vacuum tubes but nobody is building 4-core Pentium chips in their garage…
Ok, so let me get this straight… it’s somewhat difficult to design the explosives right, although now we have computers, although back then they had brilliant physicists, etc. WHATEVER.
IT DOESN’T MATTER!
I didn’t ask why is it hard to design a nuke from scratch. That’s a dumb question.
I guess I assumed the blueprints would somehow be available. It’s like I’m hypothesizing this sci-fi scenario where humans learn to share knowledge. I know this hasn’t happened yet, but imagine a single person could, like, make this drawing of a wheel, and could like send it to other people, so that everyone could start making wheels without having to fucking invent them each time.
So, imagining the totally impossible scenario that blueprint become readily available, how hard is it to build nukes? And am I right to realize that, holy shit, although we’ve forgotten about nukes in the past few years, they could become a hugely frightening element of the future?
Btw, to recap, you’re saying that enriching uranium is very hard, but creating plutonium is easy? (Assuming, say, you have a nuclear power station.) And strapping on a bunch of deuterium is easier than that?
In Russia, safes nuke YOU from orbit!!!
I’ve read that book. I recommend all 3? of his “common mans” books. They are quite funny and informative.
Notice the bolded word. CRITICAL. Weeks for calcs. Years to figure out how to produce the material and to then produce it.
And those calcs were not necessary to build a bomb so much as to know how much stuff you needed.
If the calcs guys had said you need a 100 pounds and the best they could produce short term was 10, then thats useful info.
Or if you have a limited amount of material and want as many bombs as possible.
The amount required is roughly known these days. And even if it wasnt known, if you had enough to play with and were smart about it, you could get a decent idea of how much you needed by playing with it.
The only reason the bad guys need fancy cals is if they both have a relatively small amount AND are trying to build more than one bomb.
If you have X amount of material and are happy with one bomb, the calcs arent really neccessary.
You “just” use all you have and concentrate on doing the rest of the construction and engineering right. Which IMO still aint easy.
IM technical opinion of course.
Well, assuming you have a complete set of plans, it’s still relatively hard. Machining plutonium is a challenge. From wikipedia:
I can’t find any nice concise descriptions for uranium, but I was under the impression that it was similarly difficult. The assembly itself will require a good amount of precision, and the handling of high explosives.
So you can’t just take your pile of fissionable material, components, and plans to a random machine shop and expect to get a working device. You’d need a good deal of expertise beyond the design itself.
(this message board leads to an interesting google search history…)
Relatively easy. It’s still a big enough operation that someone’s likely to find out you’re doing it.
And while the plans do exist, there are at least some components of the plans which are very closely guarded, and even if you do get the complete plans, it’s still some pretty sophisticated engineering to machine everything to close enough tolerances, and mix up exactly the right trigger explosives, and so on.
Missed the edit window:
Still, the assembly would probably be a lot easier than acquiring the materials or designs.
Also, there is probably some MIS information out there that would royally screw up a small effort to build a nuke.
IIRC the exact design of the shaped charges (the explosive “lenses” used in the implosion method) were still secret a few years ago. Do that part wrong and you’ll get an imbalanced compressive force so the core won’t squish down properly. The detonators were still on the “forbidden” export list a little while ago so it’ll be tough to buy those (and I’m pretty sure that they aren’t easy to build from scratch either). I don’t know the tolerances of an atomic weapon but the old “Good enough for government work” likely does not apply, and running tests is tough, it’s not like you can wad some C4 around a hunk of lead, set it off and see if it looks OK. Yes the basic principles are very well known but the devil is in the details. Like I said, the design of a rocket is well known, nothing secret about it, all the work was done decades ago. Try and build one that will take you to the moon and back.
Well, let’s put it another way. How hard would it to be to build a car from scratch? After all, nothing is secret about it. But if you had to build every component of a car from scratch, including making the steel from scratch, it would be a pretty tough job.
Various groups have various definitions of “from scratch”. If Japan wanted to build nuclear weapons they could do so easily. They have the nuclear material, they have nuclear power plants everywhere, they have thousands of trained engineers, they have a vast industrial base.
If North Korea wants to build a nuke, they’ve got to get the uranium somehow, they’ve got no industrial infrastructure, no real scientists, and so on. But if they really really want a nuclear bomb the only real way to stop them is to invade the country and put the leaders in jail. It might take years, it might bankrupt them, they might have end up with only a few puny bombs, but it can be done, it’s only a question of willpower.
Now consider the case of a terrorist cell hiding in a cave in Pakistan. Where do they get the fissile material? They can’t manufacture it themselves, it takes a gigantic industrial process or a working nuclear plant. So they have to steal it or get it as a gift, and most countries tend to guard their fissile material, and even countries like Pakistan prefer to keep their nuclear bombs under the control of Pakistan rather than give them to guys in caves. And even if you get the uranium or plutonium, you’ve still got quite a task ahead of you. It can be done, just like you could build a car in your basement, but it’s going to be tough. And then what? You have to deliver it to the target, and that isn’t easy if you build it in a cave in Pakistan. You aren’t going to build a suitcase nuke, you’re going to build a very large device akin to the Manhattan project nukes. You’ve got to drive it in a big truck to a seaport, load it onto a shipping container, and ship it to Washington or Tel Aviv or London or wherever.
If your terrorist was an American multimillionaire who owned a small manufacturing business it would be a lot easier, but it turns out that unlike in the movies most American businessmen aren’t terrorist fanatics.
Alright, let me ask a few more specific questions.
How much harder is it to make a hydrogen bomb once you have the uranium/plutonium kind?
How do nuclear power stations help in manufacturing plutonium? Do modern designs like pebble reactors pose the same problem? If someone wanted to make plutonium but didn’t really want an entire functioning power facility, what would be the easiest way to manufacture it?
Not only did they not have the computation capability, they didn’t know (then) how or even if it could be done initially. Today you can spend a few hundred dollars to buy textbooks off of Amazon.com on nuclear engineering and hydrocode simulation, and with a very modest personal computer run an explosive simulation in a few minutes.
Note that this is not the same thing as designing all of the technical details of a functional nuclear weapon, any more than working through the calculations of the thermodynamics of internal combustion and machine dynamics of a motor and transmission will allow you to then simply design an automobile.
I don’t think you understand what you mean by a “blueprint”. (This term, by the way, has fallen out of use except in architectural parlance, cyanotype reproduction has been long replaced by diazo “blueline” reproduction, which itself has fallen by the wayside with the advent of computer aided drafting and digital plotter reproduction.) Any complicated device is technically defined not only by drawings of the physical dimensions (engineering or “detail” drawings) but assembly and interface drawings, material and process specifications, quality assurance procedures, et cetera. And understanding all of this requires experience in the discipline-specific details of manufacture. So it isn’t as if you can just swipe a roll of drawings and hand them to a machinist to have him crank out a few nukes. Of course, the knowledge of this is more widespread than ever, and while you can’t distill the requisite practical knowledge from textbooks and reverse engineering, a number of people have provided the necessary expertise on the open market (most notoriously Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan) and so obtaining the raw knowledge is not beyond the means of an industrial nation or well-funded organization.
As for producing nuclear-grade material, this is probably the greatest handicap to nuclear proliferation. Fissile material of too low a grade is nearly worse than useless, as it will “poison” the reaction, stealing neutrons and generating energy too slowly to be truly destructive, instead fizzling out with only a very modest blast. (The North Korean device, if it was genuine at all, was very likely such a fizzle.) Crude uranium bombs are also going to be huge.
Stranger
I think the real point of computers is that you don’t need to discover and figure out how to apply all the necessary equations. They’re all embedded there in the program. You still need to use the program and that takes significant knowledge, but much less than trying to be the program. The speed of computation is just icing on the cake.
It’s all in the theme of the modern spread of knowledge. (P.S. when people colloquially say ‘blueprints’, they mean any kind of design information. Could even be a step-by-step tutorial for n00bs.)
When the US was working on refining uranium as part of the Manhattan project in Tennessee. At its peak the program took 1/6th of the entire US electrical generation capability, mostly running the cyclotrons.
Because there’s no usable quantity of plutonium left on Earth: its half-life is such that it’s pretty much all decayed. You need to make it and to do that you need nuclear reactor.
The real barrier these days are arms controls in my view.
As in you cant just buy plutonium on the international market, attempting to do it yourself gets some fairly heavy attention, getting the tools to build things is difficult, you have to conceal or bomb harden your facilities etc etc.
Only countries that are willing to put a lot of work in and think its worth the risks are able to do it. If it was just an engineering issue alone, many more countries would be capable of building them than currently are.
Otara