Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
"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!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I think some guy may have drunk it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
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.
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.
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!
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.
That's a contorted argument designed to win a cheap point in an argument. You know exactly what the GP meant: The point of proliferation is that it leads to possession. A country possessing nukes cannot argue against proliferation without being a hypocrite - it is specifically arguing that other countries should not be able to do what it has.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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
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?)
Exactly, nothing particularly novel about the initiator.
The world and its dog knows that it is Be + Alpha emitter. In fact, the first time I read it was in high school.
Po is not the only option here. Ra will also work, so will a few others. In fact if anything makes me doubt this document is exactly this. The Hirosima and Nagasaki bombs were manufactured before the radioactive isotope industry came online. In those years everything was geared towards plutonium and U235. Very few resources were devoted to other stuff. So I would have expected to see Ra there, not Po because Ra was retrieved as a byproduct of the mining and did not require special manufacturing. IIRC the Kurchatov's first Russian bomb was with a Ra/Be initiator, not Po/Be.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
If you think it a hypocritical stance or a double standard you don't understand the standard very well.
Lets consider a simpler example... I am a gun owner who is very pro-gun and support the second amendment... does that mean I'm a hypocrite because I am all for the barring of certain people from legally owning firearms?
In this country we limit the rights of certain people... such as minors and felons, people who we as an ordered society have deemed either not yet mature enough to handle the responsibility or have shown themselves to be irresponsible through the commission (and conviction) of a very serious crime.
The same thing is seen when the United States (and others) try to stop other countries from developing/processing nuclear weapons. We don't do it arbitrarily and say "Nyeh, we want to be the only ones with the bomb"... instead we do it to generally unstable nations who are less likely to act responsibly with it.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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.
Overthrowing the dictator we installed isn't a "war of aggression." At most, it's self-defense.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War
When making a nuke, the design is not a major obstacle, a handful of smart guys n gals could come up with a design from scratch pretty easy. It is the refinement of the delicious weapons grade nuclear material that is the problem. I say: Lets all share the love, nukes all or for none. If you want to blame someone for nuclear proliferation, blame the US govenment, they've given away a lot more nuclear secrets.
wait, lets go thru those 1 by 1. New nuke design: I you have the resources to make it, getting a design for free is just a little bonus, so who cares. Plans to invade Iran/Korea: The US has plans when it invades places? seriously tho if the US invades Iran or North Korea, that would be bad and wrong, I hope any plans are exposed, the US shouldn't do it. Defense of Taiwan plans: lets be brualy honest, the plan is: fuck 'em, let the chinks take it.
ok ok, seriously, joking aside. The answer to all these is basiclly this: Do you not think that if someone can hand these to wikileaks, they could and would sell it the chinese just as easily? Wikileaks exposes not just the data, but the insecurity of the system.
What would you prefer:
Scallywag gives Tiawan defence plans to wikileaks, controversy ensues, generals get kicked in the balls for poor security, plans are rewritten, security tightened. US happy.
OR
Traitor gives Tiawan defence plan to Chinese, US doesn't know, wallows in self satisfaction, US gets pwned.
As for police roit control plans, they should be released, fact is if an angry mob is about to go on the rampage, some nerd isn't going to pop up his head in the middle and say 'quick everyone down this street, the police will be waiting if we go that way' and have the crowd follow. However, if the police plan to use it against a peaceful protest, then the people ought to know how the police plan on attacking them so they can avoid being oppressed. And if the plan involves beating down and teargassing people who aren't doing anything wrong, people ought to know.
As the a drug raid, two words: Legalise It.
Personal secrets, now theres a lamo one. Do you think this stuff wouldn't be published by newspapers? If the government is going to stick thier noses into our lives they should expect the same. Don't want it to get out out you banged your secretary? shouldn't have banged her then. Personally, I like to hear about it when politicians fuck underage kids, or if they have a secret diary full of racist comments. I think its generally a good thing to know if the people who make our laws are liars, or racists or paedophiles.
Also, may I add, one final note, warning someone the pigs are after them is not obstructing justice.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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.
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.
Yes, Iran and North Korea (e.g.) aren't quite trustworthy when it comes to implements of destruction. However, you're making the assumption that the US is the opposite. That's where the hypocrisy lies.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
You seem to know your way around making bombs. Say, would you be interested in moving to Tehran?
If so, drop me a message.
Full Tilt
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.
You mean the one Saddam started, using aggression as in unprovoked attack? The one we told him we'd be just fine with? That one?
Iraq was the aggressor, with our full blessings. Please to get your head out of your hat, or wherever it is that you've had it stuck.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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"
>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.
Give me a break, the US does every dirty trick in the book. Just because our cruelty is more subtle and hidden behind flowery prose does not make the US 'the good guys'.
The US violates virtually every treaty established for the good of mankind. They violate the geneva convention, they continue to build and maintain a nuclear arsenal, they are developing and deploying space weapons, they are developing and utilizing chemical weapons, they ignore unfavorable WTO rulings, they are committing wars of aggression throughout the world in response to a simple police matter.
Further the US has rounded up its own people during world war II, forced them into concentration camps and imposed forced sterilization. The US employs a public education system that creates a fabricated version of US history to teach to its youth to instill a false sense of patriotism. Those same impressionable young minds are forced to swear allegiance to their central government.
Lets see, spying on citizens. Requiring 'permits' to openly protest. A well established youth 'education' program. Centralized power. Incarceration without trial. The great atrocities of Nazi Germany really had nothing to do with Jews you know.
Notice I do not include myself as part of the US. I may have been born within its borders and I certainly consider myself part of the PEOPLE but I want no part in the festering evil that is the government in this nation. I do not claim it, I do not recognize its right to exert authority over me by force of arms, and I don't want it.
'So, you don't pay taxes and you're either looking for a new place to live after you surrender your citizenship or you're actively working to overthrow this evil regime?'
Love it or leave it? Actually yes, I actively work in a non-violent manner to change and/or overthrow this regime. I pay its taxes and obey its laws, just as I would obey any violent psychopath who forced me at gunpoint to do as he says. But when time comes to resist, you resist, be it an evil regime or an individual psychopath.
'Because I'm sure someone who feels as strongly as you do wouldn't want to benefit from anything the US government or other citizens do to improve your life.'
You act as if the two are related. The US government is not representative of my citizens or community, that is the point.
Sometimes I find the arrogance of Slashdot incredible. It doesn't matter what history records - the document can't be correct because you "wouldn't expect" the configuration it shows. You can't even be bothered to google or do any other research.