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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.'"
I have tried to make a bomb with this diagram and I have had no problems with the designs. I guess it must b[NO CARRIER]
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Ok we get it, wikileaks has a lot of cool shit to check out, but this is getting redundant.
It's not news to say "Hey look wikileaks has XXX up". People can goto wikileaks themselves and see without you guys posting it like its real news.
But I thought the mechanics of such a device were pretty well understood? Don't they just divide a sphere with sufficient critical mass into "pie" pieces and then just use explosives to force all the pieces together at the appropriate time? (I'm sure it's not quite THAT simple.)
Cheers,
Now where did I leave my spare polonium?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Having the plans, and having the tooling and know-how to actually follow the plans to get a working device are two hugely different matters.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I expect that this is going to get Wikileaks a lot of publicity, but I think it may be harmful publicity-- whenever they try to claim that they're doing a useful service, people are now going to point at this and say "yeah, and also publishing plans for weapons."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"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." ;-)
Wikipedia gives the half-life of the most commonly used Polonium isotope with about 138 days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium
This may be fine for a bomb that is to be used shortly after manufacture, but not for a warhead that is supposed to sit in a missile silo for years. Of course, the USA wanted to use the bomb on Japan, so long-term storagewas not an issue
C - the footgun of programming languages
What exactly is so "novel" about the description of the neutron initiator? This design of the "urchin" has been known for decades and hasn't been novel since the 50's. No one even uses them anymore due to unpredictability, all implosion weapons use pulsed neutron generators based on fusion of deuterium with tritium. If anything, the document merely serves to confirm that we've been right about our ideas on how the thing originally worked.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Back in the mid 70's, Electronics Australia (hobbyist HAM radio and electronics magazine - now defunct) did a mock project that showed you how to make a non-portable atomic bomb. The design was based on firing a large uranium bullet at a uranium target. The target was encased with several tonnes of concrete in order to contain the critical mass long enough for an explosion to occur. In the article they talked about how construction of the bomb would basically kill the workers, which at the time seemed stupid, but in these days of suicide bombers seems reasonable.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
...until the design which involves a pringles can is available.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Actually, very specific information about the Fat Man is widely available. For example, wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man -- but you can do even better with a quick search.
Having the schematics is a nice start, but even if you manage to collect the components, handle the components safely and actually construct something similar to the Fat Man, you end up with an ENORMOUS device that is relatively weak compared to the nuclear devices of today. Your going to have trouble sneaking this monstrosity, say, through the Holland tunnel into NYC.
Now, schematics for a suitcase nucleur device made from readily available and cheap components... that would raise my eyebrows.
Writing a new Godwin's law, are you? See some information you don't like then equate it to child porn and get it banned?
The design is over 50yrs old. Sheesh.
"...atomic weapons development programs of countries like Iran"
Starting to believe in your own propaganda can be an indicator that there is something in your tap water.
No, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
The Slashdot love for Wikileaks seems childish and immature. I understand that "information wants to be free" and that "censorship is bad", but I think we need to recognize that there is a limit to the healthy release of this sort of information. There's a reason you can't find this kind of material in a library, and it's not because they want to "repress your thoughts" or make you into a "(insert favorite conspiracy theory here) drone".
Obviously we would have little problems if these were plans for a gun instead of a nuclear device, and both kill people. But it seems like we should exercise some judgment before we decide that all information about everything should be available to all people all the time. "Woah! Cool! Nuclear Weapons plans! I bet we'd get a lot of press if we released THOSE!" seems like poor justification for wanting to distribute material of this kind.
I'm uncomfortable with this, and I'm sure others are too. There's a difference between sharing with P2P, sharing scientific information, and sharing nuclear weapons plans, especially on a site called "Wikileaks". The first I can justify by saying, "Lots of good stuff is shared on P2P". The first I second justify by saying, "Although these journals may technically hold the copyright on this information, the American people paid for it and it's ultimately good to release scientific information to the public." The third is ultimately pretty tough to justify. If Wikileaks was instead a book about "Engineering the World War" and parts of the plans were released to diagram how the allies used particular types of circuitry, I think I'd be okay with it. But simply releasing plans like this for no other reason than attention whoring seems at best like an incredibly severe lapse in judgement. And I'm ashamed to be part of a community that is supporting it.
Wikileaks seems to have a very crude (and some would argue wholly unintelligent) sense of right and wrong. Their philosophy lacks any nuance - all they seems to trump is that everything and anything should be published. If anyone says otherwise then they start screaming like an impudent 5 year old - CENSORSHIP - CENSORSHIP - I AM BEING GAGGED - THIS IS SUPPRESSION - THIS IS AN OUTRAGE.
Some of what they put out has a rightful place to enable anonymous whistleblowing. However they seem to be unable to discriminate between something that is rightful and something that is completely wrong. They will eventually find themselves far far on the wrong side of the law and will disappear. The shame in that is that the route for anonymous whistleblowing will then have been removed due to their inability to make good judgements.
Now that Wikileaks has the bomb, people will think twice about trying to shut it down!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
This isn't complete. It omits an important detail that has never appeared in US open publications but has appeared in some materials from the former USSR.
What this looks like is close to what Klaus Fuchs gave to the Russians when he was spying at Los Alamos. A similar rough sketch was published decades ago, but not one with dimensions.
Thank you for contributing to nuclear weapons proliferation... Looks like you did...
Hopefully, there is, indeed, a fault in there somewhere, which Wikileaks were either sincerely unable to find or are simply lying about having missed.
These — along with their recent run-in with the judge — raises important questions, however. Are there secret documents in existence, that WikiLeaks would refuse to make available if given?
I mean, if it is not an ancient (though just as deadly) nuclear bomb design, but something more recent? How about plans for America's invasion of Iran or North Korea? What about the plans for our defense of Taiwan — there must be some uncomfortable answers to ugly questions in there...
What about civil government? A police-department's plans for riot-prevention, or a coordinated anti-drug raid?
What about "personal" secrets? How about a politician's diary? How about that of a CEO of a big corporation — he may have recorded private thoughts in there, such as whether his secretary is genuinely more affectionate to him, than his wife?
When does "strong transparency" turn into treason, obstructing justice, or invasion of privacy?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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
I don't need to transport it anywhere. A "Fat Man" exploding in a house bought for the purpose years ago anywhere in Brooklyn or Jersey City will still be devastating to New York... Especially, if you scale the project and blow up several of these in different locales.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Surely this is the engineering equivalent of child porn...
Ah, you mean a mostly artificially manufactured boogie-man, the mere mention of which instantly trumps any reasoned debate? Then yes, it probably is that.
I don't really get your "encouragement" argument, though. Do you really think some totalitarian dictator of a god-forsaken country is going to roll out of bed one morning, see this, and go "Whelp, time to start a 20 year plutonium enrichment program"?
This information is nothing new to anyone with any kind of semblance of the resources necessary to make any use of it.
sic transit gloria mundi
In a high-profile First Ammendment case Howard Morland and the Progressive tried to publish Fusion-bomb (aka "Hydrogen bomb") design details in 1979. The government eventually dropped its case
Here's the book; http://www.amazon.com/Secret-That-Exploded-Howard-Morland/dp/0394512979
and a background artcile by Howard on his deductions and something of the legal case http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/cardozo.html
oh yeah - even Greenpeace seem to have pretty pictures - wouldn't trust those guys to assemble one though http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/fig05.gif
peter xyz
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.
There, fixed that for ya.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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?)
Well..
Beware of the trinity : KNOWLEDGE, MEANS, and INTENT.
In order to do anything, you must have knowledge, means, and intent. There are plenty of governments with the intent on making an impression on the global political front by any means necessary including posing a nuclear threat. Some of those governments have the means to accomplish this and lack the knowledge, while others may have the knowledge but not the means.
The trick to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is to keep the government with the means from being able to cooperate with the governments with the knowledge, especially when they both share the same intent. This means trying to limit the flow of information, funding, and materials using any means necessary.
Nice job of trivializing the need for secrecy by equating the information to build a nuclear weapon with child pornography.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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
I was wondering what to do with my little brother for his 6th grade science competition. Thanks Wikileaks!
The problem with asking them to "discriminate between something that is rightful and something that is completely wrong" is that right and wrong are matters of opinion and absolutely not universal. I would hypothesise that those running Wikileaks may well be willing to publish things that they themselves consider 'wrong' on the basis that they do not consider it their own right to make that judgement.
All those parts, they are part of a pinball machine.
...and all that needs is a single waffer-thin mint :-)
Seriously, though - methinks that a terrorist with the brains and resources to acquire or build a nuke would also have the brains to work out that mailing packets of green-dyed talcum powder to minor government officials (or leaving some black boxes with flashing LEDs scattered around) was a far more effective way of causing panic, disruption and economic damage.
Even for a country, posessing one bomb is simply going to give the USA an excuse to go mediaeval on your ass (and those guys can make a big mess of your capital city without splitting a single nucleus). The serious issue with "rogue states" is if/when they start building the infrastructure to mass produce enough efficient, modern weapons to play hardball.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I can't tell if you're being serious or not. Your post is either +5 funny or -2 Flamebait.
This design will do nothing to further the aims of 'terrists'. Obtaining the raw materials is such a great hurdle in itself that the actual plans for this bomb are of secondary importance. I knew fairly specific information about this type of bomb when I was 10. I read about it in my encyclopedia, which I believe was a 1967 edition.
If this seems like dangerous or obscure knowledge to you, then you really have place discussing it.
These plans are about as useful as a map to the moon- They are so useless without an extensive infrastructure that they are practically worthless.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
> 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.
Will Wikileaks always know what is harmless and what is not?
A mistake could - quite literally - blow up in their face or mine.
It worries me that the Geek so easily trusts and defends an arbitrary power wielded in secret by one of his own.
>Neither Iran nor North Korea have waged wars of aggression in the past 50 years.
North Korea hasn't waged a war of aggression in the past 50 years... for a reason. The korean war ended with the south free because there were US troups at the border to keep north korean troops from taking the south.
Iran I agree may be exaggerated as a threat, but you should consider the roll that America's wars have played in history over the past 50 years.
Cold War Era:
The Korean War
Lebanon crisis of 1958
Bay of Pigs Invasion
Dominican Intervention
Vietnam War
Tehran hostage rescue
Grenada
Beirut
Panama
Post Cold War Era:
Gulf War
Somalia
Yugoslavia
Bush Era:
Afghanistan
Philippines
Liberia
Iraq
A lot of these conflicts had minor US involvement, but I've listed them for completeness (Liberia involved sending "three warships with 2,300 Marines into view of the coast," and funding Economic Community of West African States troops.)
What should be most notable about every last one of these wars, is that while some of them were major mistakes, all of them were in defense of pretty much every first world democratic country, and not just the united states.
People seem to enjoy bashing the United States for it's mistakes, and sometimes we deserve it, but the truth is that the current balance of power has benefited pretty much everyone posting on slashdot. There have been no new world wars for a reason. The soviet union ended it's domination of europe, and was not able to press in further than they did for a reason. Every first world nation prizes it's military alliance with the US for a reason.
The truth is that the roll that the US plays is maintaining a balance of power with democratic nations at the top, and dictatorial nations at the bottom. The truth is that without the US forces there to maintain that balance of power, this would end quickly. The other first world nations do not have comparable military forces, and largely don't have the forces necessary to defend themselves from their neighbors.
Consider what would have happened without US forces to maintain the ballance of power:
1. In the cold war, pretty much all of Europe would have ended up in soviet hands.
2. South Korea would fall to North Korea *immediately* if US forces weren't there to back them up.
3. Taiwan would end up in Chinese hands *today* if the US wasn't committed to defending them from invasion.
4. Pakistan would have difficulty surviving without US military aid.
5. Israel probably wouldn't survive without US backing.
Israel is probably the most controversial of those choices, and a lot of people, myself included, are pretty unhappy with how they treat the palestinians, but I don't think anyone wants to see Israel destroyed (well... except for the people trying to destroy it) as that would cost considerably more lives than the current conflict.
So while it may be reasonable to criticize specific US actions, it's pretty ridiculous to act like you don't want the US there defending your interests, or that you're unhappy with the status quo.
Not trying to write a new Godwin's law - my point is that we as a society have decided that child pornography is so distastefully abhorrent that it is worth suspending free speech/expression in order to stamp it out. I don't believe that this is the only example of information which ought to be kept locked away, I do believe that we should be extremely (extraordinarily!) careful in what we decide to suppress, but I would have thought that design details for nuclear weaponry would fit into this category.
It's not information I don't like - hey, who isn't interested in design details for a powerful piece of technology - but maybe, just maybe, I shouldn't be given the opportunity to scratch this particular itch.
Hope that make sense.
--- Nick, hard at work
"Great plans and quick shipping. Very recommended!!1! A+++++++"
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
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?