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Wikileaks Releases Early Atomic Bomb Diagram
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks has released a diagram of the first atomic weapon, as used in the Trinity test and subsequently exploded over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, together with an extremely interesting scientific analysis. Wikileaks has not been able to fault the document or find reference to it elsewhere. Given the high quality of other Wikileaks submissions, the document may be what it purports to be, or it may be a sophisticated intelligence agency fraud, designed to mislead the atomic weapons development programs of countries like Iran. The neutron initiator is particularly novel. 'When polonium is crushed onto beryllium by explosion, reaction occurs between polonium alpha emissions and beryllium leading to Carbon-12 & 1 neutron. This, in practice, would lead to a predictable neutron flux, sufficient to set off device.'"
Yeah, and you'd think a country like Iran would have other ways to get this kind of information. Like, I dunno, stealing it from Pakistan.
The nuclear cat is out of the bag, and as long as the US has a single nuke, they have no place to lecture others about non-proliferation.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You just described the "Little Boy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_boy/). The document in question describes the "Fat Man" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man), a wholly different design.
I thought the whole dirty bomb idea had been largely debunked as an effective weapon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb/ That is, aside from the psychological, panic-inducing effects related to the prospect of 'radiation clouds' spreading over a city.
Fission bombs are easy to build. Building them in the '40s, without computers to perform simulations on and without a huge amount of published research to build on was hard. Now it's very expensive but not particularly hard. If you're a terrorist, you are almost certain never to have the resources required to build such a device, although you might already have the required knowledge. If you want a nuclear bomb for terrorist use then finding out where some of the ones that vanished from the USSR when it broke up is likely to be a lot cheaper than building your own. If you are a nation state and want one then you probably already have the knowledge required to build one and just need the materials. Building the facilities to refine them without the international community noticing is likely to be very hard, however.
This document is, however, very interesting to military historians. It's not the sort of think Wikileaks usually carries, since it has very little (if any) relevance to modern events, but for someone researching the history of the Manhattan Project or the end of World War II it's a valuable resource (although less so than it would be if it could be validated for authenticity).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's the psychological, panic-inducing effects the terrorists are really for. Yes, they kill people, but what they are really after is the fear of the surviving people.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The Trinity design, and by extension the first Soviet and British weapons, was a solid sphere of plutonium at the centre of which was the neutron source known as the initiator, or by its designers - the Gadget. There was a subcritical mass of plutonium in the bomb, but if it was compressed it would become supercritical and explode (compressing, reduces the distance between nuclei making it more likely that a neutron from one fissioning nucleus will hit another and propagate a chain reaction).
The compression was achieved using a sphere of high explosive lenses which when detonated acted to symmetrically squeeze the plutonium core into a tiny fraction of its original volume. At the same time, the initiator would be crushed, rupture and begin spilling additional neutrons into the core of the bomb. The timing here is crucial, there is actually only a tiny tiny fraction of a second for the bomb to reach optimum conditions for fission, so even though the initiator spits out billions of neutrons, only ten or so are present at the crucial moment!
The Trinity design was pretty much obsolete in the US from about 1948 when the US exploded a series of bombs in Operation Sandstone. These weapons used a so called levitated core - a hollow core of plutonium rather than a solid core. The hollow core allows for much greater compression and allows plutonium to go much further. It also led to smaller, lighter weapons that could be put on a missile.
The broad design of Trinity has been known for some time now, but what has been much less understood are the designs of the explosive lenses, the detonators for the lenses and perhaps most secretive - the initiator.
Knowledge of the initiator design was crucial for the Soviet Union to explode Joe 1 in 1949, they got that from spies within the Manhattan Project, including Klaus Fuchs who had been on the initiator design team. When the US excluded the UK from nuclear weapons research (despite the UK providing them with many of the key technologies), Fuchs and co. went on to help design the first British weapon, Hurricane, which was detonated in 1952 a few days before America exploded Mike, the first true hydrogen bomb.
It's a shame this development came 40 some years after J. Robert Oppenheimer's death. He pushed to have this controlled by the U.N. and, because the American Government was so open minded, he lost all of his security clearance.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Partly why Gen. Groves wanted to drop it after it was put together. That and politics as well. He wanted to show Truman that his device could do what he promised and convince Truman not to commit on the invasion.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Polonium production was well understood. In fact, why do you think it's called Polonium? Because MMe Curie isolated it and named it, that's why. The manufacturing route was well understood and it was well characterised. It has many advantages - including the short half life which means that, a relatively short time after you have lost a bomb or had it stolen, it cannot produce an explosion any more. It is also "safe" - you can even use it for poisoning inconvenient Russian ex-KGB men, for which you would not want to carry a vial of Ra around London.
From my understanding, the bomb itself is not that complicated. One of bombs dropped on Japan was pretty much a bullet of uranium fired into a core.
The sticking point is that its rather difficult to refine the uranium and then the plutonium used in more powerful bombs.
So if you have the industrial capacity to create the uranium, the bomb itself is quite simple to assemble. If Wikileaks had an article posted about "How to refine uranium with sea water, bottle of bleach, and a house hold blender" then I would be concerned.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
No this is completely wrong. Non-proliferation is completely unilateral and is aimed at preventing all non-nuclear states from developing the bomb. Have a read if you are unsure of the terms - but don't make up half-baked analogies to support your incorrect assumptions.
So in your terms, the signatories to the NPT who possess nukes are saying "Nyeh, we want to be the only ones with the bomb". Which is why the poster that I replied to was making such a contorted point, why the US is hypocritical in its policy, and why you are flat out wrong.
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Once again, it seems people just try to rewrite history, merely spewing fascist crap repeated by rightists with an agenda...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'état
The Shah the US/UK helped to reinstall through a covert operation of bribery and supply (Operation Ajax) designed to undermine support of the popular secularist movement that the country was making (nationalising Iran's oil at the expense of British Petroleum) was an illegitimate ruler imposed on the Iranian people at the expense of the established democratically elected government of Mohammed Mosaddeq who could trace HIS lineage back to the elections - and surely that's how democracy is supposed to work... so for anyone who still believes that their country (US or UK especially) has a divine right to remove any democratically elected official who doesn't work for THEIR interests (or at least the interests of their corporations), then beware the precedent you have set, because the same tactic may be used against your own countries in the future. There is one rule for all, or you will find that you reap what you sow.
Those on the bottom always whine that it's not fair to have anyone on top, until they're on top. Then they like it.
Large scale human nature is still human nature.
Technically not true.
Summary: "The war began when Iraq invaded Iran on 22 September 1980 following a long history of border disputes. Iranians -- regained virtually all lost territory by June 1982. For the next six years Iran was on the offensive."
And leave UAE out of this.
This is not a leak, nor is it really new. The image came from the Penny Report:
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Uk/BritishBombPlans.html
If they are logged in and click "Post Anonymously" it starts at 0. If they are not logged in, it starts at -1.
For some reason, some positively modded -1 AC posts receive the moderation, but not the point. So a score of -1 positively moderated +1 Whatever, ends up with a score of -1, Whatever. The scoring will even show that the moderation gave it zero points. However, this does not always happen, as we can see with the GP. Perhaps the scores are only added when more than one positive moderation is given.
Neither Iran nor North Korea have waged wars of aggression in the past 50 years. If you're alleging that the US hasn't done so, you're being extremely naïf.
While there hasn't been a lot of fighting, North Korea is still at war with the south, so why would they need to initiate another war? They've been at war for 50 years!
And Iran invaded US territory when they took the US embassy in 1980. They've been fighting the US and Israel for 20+years since. Oh sure, there's been no official declaration of war. But you'd have to be extremely naif to believe they aren't actively participating, though indirectly, in a war against the US and Israel.
There aren't any spaced based weapons because they are only marginally better than ballistic missiles(which can reach anywhere, just not quite as quickly as something already in orbit) and would cost much more for each unit of capability. Submarines offer some of the time advantage and are much stealthier than a satellite.
Also, military planners aren't insane, so they take into account how much safer it is to ship highly radioactive material around on the ground and stick it in holes than it is to shoot it into space.
I'd be surprised if less than 1/2 of the existing capability was online at a given moment.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
> These plans are about as useful as a map to the moon-
These plans are about as useful as a photo of the moon taken with a backyard telescope. Even if the ideas in them were not already public any competent physicist would rediscover them early in his bomb design project.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Let me get this straight. You're saying that in 1953, the US sponsored a coup which deposed a the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh, a man with no ties to the Soviet Union or to Communism in any form, on the basis of what was going to happen in a country which would not exist for another twenty-seven years?
No, he's referencing Domino theory. We didn't care about democracy (we still don't), we just wanted an ally.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The United States and Russia have been disarming their arsenals for 20+ years now. There's a deliberate effort to maintain "nuclear parity" but to say that the U.S. isn't practicing what it preaches is disingenuous. From 10,000 to 2000 warheads in 20 years, and we're far better at protecting them than our ex-Soviet counterparts.
If it hadn't done there's no doubt they would have taken out Tokyo.
Except that the US only had two working bombs at that point, and both were already used. Also, IIRC, Tokyo was already firebombed at that point. Firebombing takes a lot more planes and bombs to do the job, but its effects are comparable to the nukes around at the time.
Not a typewriter
Maybe for amateurs. Folks who actually study nuclear weapons have known pretty much everything on the diagram and everything you describe as "less understood" for years now.
For the same reason, much of the amateur commentary on the Wikileaks page makes me gag.
"Diagram Roughly to scale. No easy feat in days prior to computerized drafting tools." WTF? Making a diagram to scale, even roughly, is trivial. I was doing it in the sixth grade (1974!) with little plastic ruler and a cheap metal compass. "High Explosives & Miznay/Schardin effect (e.g. shaped charge) Miznay/Schardin effect will work in this design, in all likelihood, though the additional layer of HE after the first layer of lenses is a surprise." Well, no - the second layer isn't a surprise. Richard Rhodes described it in the The Making of the Atomic Bomb" in 1986! "Neutron Initiator Theoretically workable." Well, duh. This has also been widely described in the literature - I'd have been surprised to find if it weren't as diagrammed.
Etc... etc..
except for the gallium percentage. Richard Rhodes won a Pulitzer prize for this. the documents were mostly declassified years ago, like 20 and 30 years ago for most of them, in the US. get a copy of the book, some good college physics books, multi-axis milling machines, good glove-box technology, and it's doable. the hard part is the fissile material, but with the number of rogue wacko nations joining the "atomic club," any irresponsible yutz can get a good piece of it done.
for that matter, any irresponsible yutz could be transmuting their own fuel in the backyard. see "The Radioactive Boy Scout" to see how easy. in the 60s, putting out Golden Books and PR pamphlets to get kids interested in nuclear careers had enough data in them to get you thoroughly dead ten different ways trying to bootleg your own sources at home.
It's basic science, and anybody who wants to seek can find.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
And you base this belief on what exactly?
That's why there is redundancy in the communications, bunkers, and "all the other pieces". I am something of an expert, and in practice 99%+ of the available forces can be launched in a given minute. (Yeah, I palmed a bit of a card there by restricting it to "available forces", but on any given day around 80% of the total force can be classified as available.)
The parts are kept assembled and tested. Comparing them to the Shuttle or a satellite launch vehicle is to compare apples and oranges - nuclear systems are considerably simpler and designed to react on short notice. The Shuttle and satellite launch vehicles... aren't.
Not many.
Not completely true. Our reserves were small, and so was our capacity to build more - but it was never zero. Had they been zero... How did we do Crossroads in 1946 and Sandstone in 1948?
What's missing is the material from which the moderator and tamper is made - but that's been known from other sources (Not the USSR) for years now.