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