Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Fuel How-To
ATMosby writes "The BBC has an article that pretty much sums up everything you might need to know if you wanted to refine nuclear fuel and build some atomic weapons." From the article: "Uranium is the basic raw material of both civilian and military nuclear programmes. It is extracted from either open-cast pits or by underground mining. Although uranium occurs naturally all over the world, only a small fraction is found in concentrated ores. When certain atoms of uranium are split in a chain reaction, energy is released. This process is called nuclear fission."
Sorry, but that site isn't even close to "everything you might need to know" about building a Bomb. That's more like the 5 minute capsule summary. If you really want to know everything about building a Bomb but don't want to get a security clearance, the best place to look is Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapon Archive. It's amazing just how much non-classified information it contains.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Not only that, much of the basic information about the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear weapons was openly published by the US decades ago in the book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
This handy article on what to do with your plutonium once you've refined it. A must have for any organization interested in building such a device...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I guess the slashdot editor thought it was a slow news day or something....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The tough thing about implosion bombs is getting a uniform shockwave. This requires high purity explosives that behave exactly the way you want, every time, high-predictability capacitors, and very time-precise triggering mechanisms. Parts that can be used in the triggering mechanisms (such as krytrons) are harder to come by.
Such capacitors and explosives are within the reach of a state like Iran (and Iraq claimed to have produced them before the first Gulf War), Krytrons, however, use beta from Ni-63 to help keep the gas in them ionized (to allow for a faster arc discharge), so they take more effort.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
Iraq got nuclear training from Pakistan's AQ Khan during the 1980s, while the US beefed up Hussein's rudimentary WMD program. And Pakistan got its krytrons from the US at that time, too.
--
make install -not war
So your issue is really just how detailed are available designs, then? Ok, lets use a public description of Little Boy (the first one I ran into - much better designs are available):
64,1kg of HEU (80% average enrichment). The bullet was a cyllindrical stack of U-235 rings each 10cm wide and 16 cm long, containing 25.6kg total (6 rings). The stack was backed by a tungsten carbide disk and steel backplate, all within a 1/16th inch thick steel can to form a complete projectile. The target was a hollow cylinder 16 cm long and wide, weighing 38.4 kg. It was fabricated of two rings that were inserted into the bomb separately. The bullet contained 89% enriched HEU; the target the rest of the uranium.
The bullet was encased in a boron "safety sabot" to help prevent accidents; there was also a plug on the target. When fired, these would strip off. You could easily omit such safety features if you were unconcerned with safety.
The tamper assembly was thick tungsten carbide surrounded by a steel forging, 60cm wide, with a combined mass of 2300kg. A hole was bored in the forging to insert the tamper and the target; the hole was threaded to allow secure attachment of the gun. At the back of the hole, past the target, there was space for one or more polonium initiators (I can dig up several polonium initiator designs for you if you would like; Little Boy used four very inefficient ones - the bomb would have worked without an initiator, and the decision to use an initiator wasn't even established till March 1945).
The gun was a 3" antiaircraft gun, 6.5" wide, 6 feet long, bored out to 4", weighing 450kg, with a breech block of 34kg. Standard cordite propellant was used, to achieve a 300m/s (slow) velocity. Of course, given how unsafe the Little Boy design was, even dropping the device hard enough could have given some significant (even full) yield.
The complete weapon was 126 inches long, 28 inches in diameter, and 8900 pounds. Need a diagram?
Note that being "exact" doesn't matter; Little Boy was a very conservative design, and allows for very large tolerances of error. The worst you'll get is a lower yield.
P.S. - I found this information in 5 minutes. Imagine someone actually dedicated to the cause of building a nuclear weapon...
All we want to do is eat your brains.