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Learning to Contain Underground Nuclear Explosions

By Dr. Robert R. Brownlee

June 2002

Sometime in 1956 Dr. Alvin Graves, Division Leader of the Test Division at Los Alamos told me that we were going to have to test underground in order to reduce fallout as much as possible. He asked me to see what I could learn about it by making what calculations I could.

The temperatures and pressures generated by a nuclear explosion are such that there was considerable doubt that any underground test buried at a "reasonable" depth could be contained.

In 1956 we were severely limited in computing capabilities-compared to nowadays they were laughable, and miniscule, and arguably nonexistent. I had the equations of state of four materials. They were air and water, aluminum and uranium. As it happens, there is a lot of aluminum in NTS soil, so I called that "earth". I called that of uranium "fire", and the others were air and water, so with earth, air, fire and water, how could I fail?

In attempting to mock up the earth, I had some information about NTS soil densities and water content. I used a cylindrical pipe filled with air of several densities, depending upon the possible use of vacuums. I was allowed considerable freedom to choose other parameters as I wished. For example, what might the efficacy of plugs of various masses be, and where might they be placed for optimum results. I worked regularly with Bill Ogle, the deputy division leader, and we decided to have a first test in an "empty" pipe (cables were present), open at the top. Then we would do a test with a cap, and then do tests with plugs, the first one used to be in the middle of the hole, and the second one at the bottom. Thus we hoped to learn from test to test, acquiring data and information incrementally. Incidentally, the Pascal B test, and those immediately following, had a 4-foot diameter pipe. The cap welded to the top of Pascal B was four inches thick, so was of appreciable mass from a "man-handling" point of view.

The first test of our "series" was Pascal A, with results as documented.

For Pascal B, my calculations were designed to calculate the time and specifics of the shock wave as it reached the cap. I used yields both expected and exaggerated in my calculations, but significant ones. When I described my results to Bill Ogle, the conversation went something like this.

Ogle: "What time does the shock arrive at the top of the pipe?"
RRB: "Thirty one milliseconds."
Ogle: "And what happens?"
RRB: "The shock reflects back down the hole, but the pressures and temperatures are such that the welded cap is bound to come off the hole."
Ogle: "How fast does it go?"
RRB: "My calculations are irrelevant on this point. They are only valid in speaking of the shock reflection."
Ogle: "How fast did it go?"
RRB: "Those numbers are meaningless. I have only a vacuum above the cap. No air, no gravity, no real material strengths in the iron cap. Effectively the cap is just loose, traveling through meaningless space."
Ogle: And how fast is it going?"

This last question was more of a shout. Bill liked to have a direct answer to each one of his questions.

RRB: "Six times the escape velocity from the earth."

Bill was quite delighted with the answer, for he had never before heard a velocity given in terms of the escape velocity from the earth! There was much laughter, and the legend was now born, for Bill loved to report to anybody who cared to listen about Brownlee's units of velocity. He says the cap would escape the earth. (But of course we did not believe that would ever happen.)

The next obvious decision was made. We'll put a high-speed movie camera looking at the cap, and see if we can measure the departure velocity.

In the event, the cap appeared above the hole in one frame only, so there was no direct velocity measurement. A lower limit c

http://nuclearweaponarchive.or...

What a pile of BS that article you linked to is. Saddam Hussein indicated in 1975 that the purchase of the reactor from France was "the first Arab attempt at nuclear arming" source
Make sure you read the full article. It's quite enlightening, especially the part about how Saddam determined Iraq needed an insider at the IAEA in order to find out how it operated, what it knew, and how best to keep their program hidden from them.

For example: http://nuclearweaponarchive.or...

With regard to "thermal equilibrium" we have from the above, Quote: "[Note: Many descriptions in the open literature exist dating back to the late seventies claiming that energetic X-rays from the primary are absorbed by the radiation casing (or plastic foam), and are re-emitted at a lower energy - implying that some sort of energy down-shifting mechanism (like X- ray fluorescence) is at work. This is a misconception. The lining of the casing is in local thermal equilibrium with the energy flux impinging on it, and re-radiates X-rays with the same spectrum. The X-ray spectrum softens simply because the photon gas cools as it expands to fill the entire radiation channel.] In physics a closed container of radiation, like the radiation case, is called a "hohlraum". This German word for "cavity" (which has the obvious English cognates "hole" and "room") has been attached to the study of the thermodynamics of radiation since the last century in connection with blackbody radiation. German physicists early in this century used it as a theoretical model for deriving the blackbody radiation laws from quantum mechanics. Energy in a hohlraum necessarily comes into thermal equilibrium and assumes a blackbody spectrum. This is important for obtaining the necessary symmetry for an efficient implosion. Regardless of how uneven the initial energy distribution within the casing is, the radiation field will quickly establish thermal equilibrium throughout the casing - heating all parts to the same temperature."

Hans Bethe said they made complicated bombs in those days. Hmmmm...

I can do a write up for how to build a nuclear bomb for my terrorist brothers based on my rudimentary undergraduate physics education, but there's no way in hell those instructions would actually produce anything useful.

Just because you're ignorant - that doesn't mean everyone else is. There's a lot of stuff openly available for the use of those that aren't [ignorant].

To add to what DerekLyons has posted, the cep (circular error probable, used to be written as C.E.P.) for an RV on the Trident II D5 with a W88 is given as 300-400ft. If memory serves that's considered effective against hardened targets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II gives 143 consecutive successful test flights
https://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/slbm/d-5.htm
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/W88.html

Snowden mentioned how the NSA conducted cyber espionage operations on Hong Kong and China infrastructures. He even mentioned specific targets. These are clearly "highly classified state secrets", unrelated to the domestic spying scandals.

China and Hong Kong didn't know they were the targets of "NSA conducted cyber espionage operations" or what the targets were? How dumb do you think they are? When China does the same to the US not only is it detected, but openly published.

Unless he divulged very concrete details, he divulged nothing of value to the targets of these operations. Want to know about the US arsenal? Try globalsecurity.org, wikipedia or nuclearweaponarchive.org. The only important things to keep classified are the exact details of the design, construction and capabilities. If the only thing you want to know about are the existence or general design and capabilities of anything from an RPG to a nuclear warhead, you can find it on the Internet. Hell, a lot of that info comes from Pentagon press releases!

Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision.

True. But while the size and weight of a weapon scale (roughly) linearly with yield (within a design generation), the destructive power scales with the square root of the yield. Or, to but it another way, bombs get bigger and heavier faster than they get more destructive. Which means that really big bombs hurt you by compromising delivery capability (I.E. heavier bombs reduce range) far more than they aid you by adding additional destructive power. On top of that, 5-10 megatons is sufficient to destroy most non hardened targets, even with a miss distance on the order of 5 miles or so. (And most targets of interest are in fact non hardened.)
 
If you examine a list of Soviet atmospheric tests (covering most of the "limited accuracy" and "large slow bombers" phase), this is borne out. Most weapons they tested were far smaller, and the next largest after Tsar Bomba has barely half the yield.
 
In the fashion, if you examine a list of US nuclear weapons, you find that even the most inaccurate delivery systems only have a yield in the low megaton range.
 
No, the OP is correct - large weapons, and especially the Tsar Bomba, were largely lunacy... their sizes driven by dick waving rather than military requirements.

Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision.

True. But while the size and weight of a weapon scale (roughly) linearly with yield (within a design generation), the destructive power scales with the square root of the yield. Or, to but it another way, bombs get bigger and heavier faster than they get more destructive. Which means that really big bombs hurt you by compromising delivery capability (I.E. heavier bombs reduce range) far more than they aid you by adding additional destructive power. On top of that, 5-10 megatons is sufficient to destroy most non hardened targets, even with a miss distance on the order of 5 miles or so. (And most targets of interest are in fact non hardened.)
 
If you examine a list of Soviet atmospheric tests (covering most of the "limited accuracy" and "large slow bombers" phase), this is borne out. Most weapons they tested were far smaller, and the next largest after Tsar Bomba has barely half the yield.
 
In the fashion, if you examine a list of US nuclear weapons, you find that even the most inaccurate delivery systems only have a yield in the low megaton range.
 
No, the OP is correct - large weapons, and especially the Tsar Bomba, were largely lunacy... their sizes driven by dick waving rather than military requirements.

i wonder if anyone ever built a neutron bomb

The U.S. deployed artillery shells, short-range tactical missiles, and anti-ICBM missiles with this technology from the 1970s to the mid-2000s. China, France, and the USSR also had neutron weapons. (See section 1.5.4 at this link for more more info)

Today, no nation uses the technology (supposedly).

We have NUKES. China doesn't have any scenario where they could do sufficient power projection against our conventional force, but all you need to exterminate a marine opponent of size is a few warheads.

We TESTED this, it bears reminding:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Baker8big.jpg

We even proved we can use nukes ON LAND in CONUS, because we DID:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/

We have NUKES. China doesn't have any scenario where they could do sufficient power projection against our conventional force, but all you need to exterminate a marine opponent of size is a few warheads.

We TESTED this, it bears reminding:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Baker8big.jpg

We even proved we can use nukes ON LAND in CONUS, because we DID:

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Bomb but were afraid to ask. It really helps if you have a little bit of knowledge of Physics, but there is stuff here that I thought had never been declassified. Like detailed information on Initiators and hydrodynamics. Be prepared to spend a few hours reading it. Bet Ahmawannajihad has it bookmarked. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

The US currently has enough warheads to destroy the world several hundred times over.

About 20 seconds of effort yields the following: The total number of warheads of all levels of readiness stands at 9,962 warheads (with another 589 in "inactive stockpile" waiting to be dismantled). That is plenty to lay waste to any major country but hardly enough to destroy the world's military forces, let alone the world itself.

The 2% of the stockpile you recommend would be about 200 warheads, which might be enough to deter Iran, but not (in my opinion) China -- and certainly not both at once.

this was the largest that is currently in service but by no means the largest we ever made.. that falls to

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/B41.html

where this one is a mear 9 Mt.. the B41 was a 25 Mt weapon. i do wonder about the people who where building these things.. and what was going through their minds.. from the person who signed the checks/orders to the guy who was tightening the bolts.

Design yield was 100 megaton plus, but was not tested due to concerns of fallout).

After I read about the aftermath of the Tsar Bomba, I would think another concern would be cracking the fucking crust of the fucking planet.

A shock wave in air was observed at Dickson settlement at 700 km; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of 900 km. All buildings in Severny (both wooden and brick), at a distance of 55 km, were completely destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, and stone ones lost their roofs, windows and doors; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. The atmospheric disturbance generated by the explosion orbited the earth three times. A gigantic mushroom cloud rose as high as 64 kilometers (210,000 ft).

Rightly so the Soviets were accused of being incredibly irresponsible.

And frankly so is anyone who is still toying with nuclear weapons. There are no upsides to their use.

"An eventual nuclear war between any of India/Pakistan, Iran/Israel, North Korea/Somebody is far more likely to be the biggest threat this century,"

Atmospheric testing has proven that level of nuclear warfare won't be much of a problem except for the countries taking the hits. Enough warheads to match or beat that level of nuclear exchange have been detonated with little fallout (pun intended!) aboveground. Many of those shots were in the US.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/

Israel/Iran or Indo/Pak exchanges would be the least inconvenient to the rest of the world, and India has enough people to take the hit, wipe out Pakistan, and survive as a nation. When the Paks collapse and the Jihadists take over, that may well happen since if Pak nukes can't be disabled a first strike would be the best way of ending the mortal threat to India.

The Norks could hit the South, but that would green light a US nuclear response. We used to have fighters on Zulu Alert ready to vape the Norks, but now SSBNs are more secure and one could dispose of the Communists in fine style. That's what keeps them in their box so I don't expect NK to suicide.

Well that seems to be the case. I'm typing this while staring at a pair of Samsung monitors. I've got an LG Blu-Ray player behind me. I don't own a KIA or Hundai, but I like some of the Korean made stuff (its pretty good stuff). If North Korea insists upon nuclear war, and preemptive strikes are all the rage, well, ok then. If it has to be that way, it has to be that way. The US should start aiding South Korea in building silos for short and medium range missiles, carrying MK-41's. The north is run by a nutter, and collectively they believe their own crap (and drink their own bathwater). If they weren't so dangerous and so aggressive, you might feel sorry for their sad and pathetic state, but they would kill everyone in sight and blindly follow stupidity to the ends of the earth. Like a band of bad cockroaches, all you can do is fry them. It sound (really bad) but I don't really see any alternative. Cook em.

True, the timing has to be very accurate, but I'm pretty sure
microsecond accuracy is enough, or a million times less accurate than
your claim.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-1.html#Nfaq4.1.6.2

4.1.6.2.2.6:
'Creating a symmetric implosion wave requires close synchronization in firing the detonators. Tolerances on the order of 100 nanoseconds are required.'

So I wouldn't go with accuracies on the order of microseconds if I were you, you're going to need nanoseconds. Looks like picoseconds is not needed though.

I don't think detonating a chemical explosive to the
picosecond is even possible, chemical reactions are slower than that.

The rate of the reaction is a component of latency. Latencies, as long as they are consistent, do not alter accuracy. Even if it took 10 minues for the chemical reactions to take place, starting them with 100ns accuracy may be necessary if they must finish coincidentally to an accuracy of 100ns.

That's generally true, and the only weapon ever deployed that was prone to going off in an crash was probably Little Boy (that later went off on purpose over Hiroshima). The Mark IV, however, was probably somewhat more prone to accidental detonation that any of the others, which is why the core was inserted in-flight. Later, preventing accidental detonation became a serious issue and a lot of the later tests were negative tests to ensure that the safety features worked correctly.

          Full details of each type of bomb and the underlying design can be found at : http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/

          Brett

The Wikipedia article is intentionally not useful for designing anything.

However, we do have an online textbook (at roughly upper-division engineering/physics college student difficulty level) on the subject:
    http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

In terms of what's been published online -

* There's a book with precise dimensional drawings and measurements on the Little Boy type Uranium gun type bomb. Not online, but purchasable at Amazon. It's not "a blueprint" but any competent draftsman / mechanical engineer could produce blueprints to build from, given the book.

* The dimensions and materials of all the layers of the Fat Man / Mark 1 type nuclear weapons are published in numerous sources. The precise shape of the lens in the outer layer has not been, though a rough back-of-the-envelope version of the equation for the lens shape is published. A precise and buildable lens shape would require someone with a fair talent in explosives engineering and shockwave engineering, especially someone aware of what the published equation left out, but the Fat Man design is fundamentally so brick-solid-simple that one could get the lens fairly imprecise and still have a functional weapon.

Some effort has gone into not actively publishing newer weapon design details in public. But that's not nearly the same as "they're not out". A number of more modern weapons are understood to at least close to the level Fat Man and Little Boy are. There are accurate internal component photos declassified for some weapons and parts. There are detailed hands-on descriptions of some parts, by people who worked on them. Check out the Wikipedia article on the B61 bomb, for example; the fission and fusion components were shown in a declassified film (but not the explosives to compress the fission parts).

you must play some serious cricket, mang

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/FatMan640c10.jpg

Some time ago someone was to play Arsenic and Old Lace. Not wanting to mispronounce the name, he contacted Alice Longworth. She said that there were two branches of the family, and they pronounced the name differently.
T.R. was Roo-za-velt and F.D.R. was Rosa-velt.

One of the news articles on Litvinenko claimed that the Polonium used to kill him cost a megabuck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html

more info

Minor local damage??? It's a 400 kiloton equivalent airburst energy...

It will do 1 PSI overpressure (broken windows, etc) about 13 kilometers away from ground center point of explosion.

Right under the explosion, it will do about 2.5 PSI overpressure, and collapse relatively weak residential structures.

That energy level is going to kill people, if it's over inhabited areas. Not a lot of people - many or most directly under it would survive that overpressure level - but it will collapse things, and of a few things collapse people will die from the collapses.

Relevant calculations for blast overpressure:
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html Sect 5.6.2 Blast Damage and Injury

the effect of some of the firebombings was certainly comparable to the effect of nukes, just more labor-intensive.

To be precise, we actually caused more overall damage with conventional fire bombing. The two bombs accounted for only between a quarter and a third of Japanese bombing deaths. It's not that the bombs killed more people. It is (as you said) that they did it all at once and very impressively. An interesting read, for anybody who wants to look at the effects. The government also printed a manual in the 70s called "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons," which had very detailed analyses, but it's hard to come by now.

Thermal radiation is the third 'primary kill vector', and one of the most significant. I don't know if you included this in your 'initial radiation' bit, but in terms of lethality, it helps to differentiate between thermal radiation and prompt ionizing radiation. Thermal = heat = causes stuff like skin to burst into flame. Ionizing = nuclear radiation (mostly gamma rads outside the immediate blast) = does cellular damage, DNA damage, etc. Thermal radiation will be lethal beyond the range of gamma radiation lethality, IIRC.

Old school 'duck-and-cover' seems aimed at protecting against initial exposure to thermal radiation and flying debris, would only then be helpful outside the immediate blast zone, and of course gives no longer-term protection against fallout. It amounts to the best you can do under the circumstances.

Indeed, orbital velocity is 7.5km/s, and I would expect it to be below that.This lists the "speed" at 6.7 km/s or 24000km/h perhaps parent got the units wrong?

I couldn't find anything more detailed. This speed is at burnout, often as high as 400km. So re-entry velocity will be a bit higher than the listed speed of 6.7km/s.

It'll be interesting to see if this latest provocation makes Japan finally go nuclear.

The Japan Self-Defense Forces always seemed like a very sensible idea to me (have a military, but only to defend yourself), and it seems odd given the history when people like you or the USA suggest they become an aggressor military force again

It'll be interesting to see if this latest provocation makes Japan finally go nuclear.

I spent the better part of a 17 year Navy career testing and working with atomic weapons and follow on technology. In 1941 the notion of an atomic bomb was science fiction. It took a war to make the thing work.

It may have been science fiction to the general public (which includes all non physicists), but it did in fact have a sound theoretical basis. (Unlike cold fusion.) It didn't take a war to make them work, it took a war to spur their engineering development. They would have worked regardless.
 
 

I can't to this day discuss many of the things I know but when I left the service in 1963 I was inspecting little light 1 kiloton tank killers and rumors had an atomic rifle grenade...

You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
 
 

Lord only knows how far things have come in 40 plus years.

Not as far as you fantasize they were 45 years ago. (You don't seem to have kept up with the field, at lot has been declassified since 1963.) I invite you to check out Carey Sublette's excellent Nuclear Weapons FAQ and then join us on the Usenet group alt.war.nuclear for further discussion.
 
 

My experience has been that is you can envision something it has a basis in fact.

I can envision plaid polka dotted elephants - but their only basis in fact is the consumption of psychoactive chemicals.
 
 

Can you even imagine how devastating cold fusion would be to the oil industry? I wouldn't be a bit surprised to discover that cold fusion is already a reality. It - like many other related things - never see the light of day for many reasons.

Yeah, when all else fails - invoke a conspiracy theory. It relieves you of dealing with the really hard questions... Like the lack of a theoretical basis for cold fusion. Like the fact that despite twenty years of trying, the experiments cannot be replicated on a reliable basis. It's all Big Oil and their evil minions.

To my knowledge we've never tested a live ICBM but we DID test a SLBM during Operation Dominic. The USS Ethan Allen launched a Polaris Missile and the RV came down somewhere near Christmas Island and had an airburst detonation. Check out this site and search for "Frigate Bird" for some pictures.

Your number is wrong on one count, and possibly another:

Britain does not have independent nuclear weapons.

States outside those five have large arsenals. India for example.

I have actually done some theoretical calculations based upon other people/scientist's "crazy" theories, and it is possible that an explosion the equivalent to a 3 gigaton TNT explosion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent ) to be created. Depending on where is happens, it might create a crater or hump ( http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Effects/UndergroundEffects.html ), but probably a crater between 10 kilometers to 18 kilometers wide. This explosion would probably create an earthquake between 8.5 and 10.5 on the ritcher scale ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale ) that is felt in Geneve, Switzerland, and an earth quake between 7 and 8.5 felt in Paris, France. The fun thing is that the amplitude of the quake would be very large, and the ground might not even shake more than twice due to the size of the whole thing.

Please note that these calculations assume that all the equipment works perfectly (, or a error of less than a thousandth of a percent). I did account for error in the calculations, especially how practical large/nuclear explosions tend to have caused slightly larger earthquakes than calculated ( http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0617181 ).

Other notes: There exists a chance that a huge explosion would just create a big crater with a small tunnel going toward the center of the earth. If you have trouble visualizing this, try visualizing the Death Star.

Is anyone else putting their aluminum foil hats on and thinking that these scientists are absolutely mad?! And why did these mad scientists get to have a chance to destroy the world before me?

Rockets are expensive now, because they're not mass produce; but they could eventually be cheaper for transport.

There have been plenty of ICBMs built...

Let's consider an antipode capable ICBM (range: 12,000 km). One of the smaller ones is the three-stage solid Minuteman III , weighing in at 35,400 kg (I suspect most of that is solid fuel), and delivering 3 Mk 12 RVs, about 400 kg payload total.

I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to design better than that.

The "flyaway" cost of Minuteman III is about $5 million (which isn't too bad for a military device!), perhaps we could drop that to $1 million in the private sector, then it is just $2,500 per kg to antipode.

This is on the order of 100 times more expensive than flying...

Rockets are expensive now, because they're not mass produce; but they could eventually be cheaper for transport.

There have been plenty of ICBMs built...

Let's consider an antipode capable ICBM (range: 12,000 km). One of the smaller ones is the three-stage solid Minuteman III , weighing in at 35,400 kg (I suspect most of that is solid fuel), and delivering 3 Mk 12 RVs, about 400 kg payload total.

I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to design better than that.

The "flyaway" cost of Minuteman III is about $5 million (which isn't too bad for a military device!), perhaps we could drop that to $1 million in the private sector, then it is just $2,500 per kg to antipode.

This is on the order of 100 times more expensive than flying...

How about south Africas nuclear weapons research? Supposedly they managed to build a gun type bomb spending an 8 digit amount of money in US$ equiv.

Yes, according to this article that is correct, but:

1. You use "8-digit" to make it sound more like 10 million dollars, when the estimate is on the order of 70 million dollars (quite on the high side of 8 digits). Further, this is in early 1990s dollars. Today's dollars would peg the cost at around 110 million dollars per-weapon.

2. The article makes the note that the costs of the weapons DO NOT take into account the cost of designing and building the enrichmnent facilities, only the costs of running those facilities once all issues had been resolved. If you read the article I linked, you'll find that South Africa spent almost 10 years creating enough fissile material for their first bomb.

When you consider that the most expensive part of making a bomb is creating the highly-enriched uranium, and that those same facilities full-on could make enough material for one bomb every year, you get an idea of the high costs. Spending 10 years getting the plant to full efficiency probably made the first weapon 10x more expensive than those that followed. That puts the cost of fielding your first weapon in the 500 million range, a non-trivial amount for a country like Iraq.

Well when combined to independent research from Switzerland that Saddam had calutron technology than can enrich yellowcake uranium to weapon's grade, and documents that the UN has ignored such reports, might well bring about reasonable doubt that Saddam had plans to enrich the uranium to weapon's grade had he been left alone. But then I used to work for lawyers, so what do I know?

Also from the original article:
"The yellowcake wasn't the only dangerous item removed from Tuwaitha.

Earlier this year, the military withdrew four devices for controlled radiation exposure from the former nuclear complex. The lead-enclosed irradiation units, used to decontaminate food and other items, contain elements of high radioactivity that could potentially be used in a weapon, according to the official. Their Ottawa-based manufacturer, MDS Nordion, took them back for free, the official said."

Shows that Saddam could have made weapons out of them.

But then I've had a personal attack on me that I lack basic reasoning skills, by someone named Fjandr that didn't seem to notice that part of the article. So I guess it dismisses all of that, because that is what fallacy based personal attacks are designed to do.

Proof that Saddam had calutrons that could be used to enrich yellow cake uranium to weapons grade. Someone in Switzerland tried to tell the UN about it, and cites independent research as well.

Bill Clinton said the same thing in 1998 so this is not made up.

I just finished reading much of The Nuclear Weapons FAQ, and it seems that even builing an implosion bomb isn't *that* difficult, especially compared to producing weapons grade plutonium/uranium. Gun type bombs are easy to make, but that still leaves purifying 3% U235 to >80%, and the associated fun dealing with fluorine.

A sure way to knock down satellite are nuclear bombs carried by reconfigured ICBMs (see, test Starfish Prime). A significant portion of the nuclear club has this capability.
Of course, military satellites are designed to be radiation hardened, but this is intended as a way to survive to the effects of nuclear explosions not directly aimed at the satellite or at the cluster in question.

Modern thermonuclear weapons get more than 50% of their yield from fission, not fusion. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Teller.html

Like it really matters. So which one of you people are going to be the first to file for a patent on an atomic bomb. I don't know about the rest of you fuckers but I got this thing about having my door kicked down by the feds and getting ass raped in a federal prison.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/index.html - Favorite website

This isn't news. These diagrams came out on the internet many months ago : the site http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/ has a post on the topic from August '07. Furthermore, one of the other wikileaks pages on the early US designs make claims again that these are somehow sensitive documents. The "Los Alamos Primer" is a book you can buy at Borders, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc..., and it contains all of the original "tutorial" materials from Los Alamos regarding the design and theory behind the first bombs. While interesting content-wise, wikileaks hasn't really leaked anything here but material that was already widely known in the public.

Click here for the full story and picture.

Information like this comes from the dedication of researchers like Carey Sublette, Richard Rhodes, and Chuck Hansen. Their books & publications make for fascinating reading. Calculating the damage done as a result of these publications is an exercise left to the reader.

This is not a leak, nor is it really new. The image came from the Penny Report:
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Uk/BritishBombPlans.html

I was thinking that it was from Klaus Fuchs, but no, it's the British Penny report. "This report was completed on 1 July, was entitled Plutonium Weapon - General Description (UK Public Record Office File AVIA 65/1163, "Implosion") and gave the British atomic weapons program a preliminary design description roughly equivalent in terms of detail to the description provided the Soviets by Klaus Fuchs."

Ah, found it. It seems to be from the Nuclear Weapon archive. It doesn't appear to be an American document at all, rather something that a British scientist, William Penney, prepared to inform the British government what would be required to build its own bomb.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Uk/BritishBombPlans.html

People interested in nuclear weapon design, like the author of nuclearweaponarchive.org have had a copy of that picture for quite some time. The layout of the explosives is actually a truncated icosahedron, so the diagram is a 2d simplification of a 3d idea.