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.'"

Comments

Well,

[Daimanta]

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]

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Sounds like a short-lifed design

[Lonewolf666]

"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 ;-)

Re:Sounds like a short-lifed design

[MWoody]

I think you win for the most wildly inappropriate use of the winking smiley in Internet history.

Novel?

[deglr6328]

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.

Home made atomic bomb

[OzPeter]

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.

Re:Oooookay then....

[bignetbuy]

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.

Re:Perhaps I'm just not clever enough....

[Anonymous Coward]

you take a ball of uranium and shoot it with a bullet made of uranium...

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.

Re:Oooookay then....

[lilmunkysguy]

It's popular information already. To quote from the discussion page:

Everything in this picture is basically public knowledge. There is no misdirection OR direction here. One can deduce this much about the interior of Fat Man from the wikipedia articles. The barriers to entry in the implosion nuke market are not basic diagrams of the interior of the weapon, its the fissile material, precision manufacturing, math, detonators, and overall massive infrastructure required to pull a working example OF the design of. Its all well and good having a diagram of the space shuttle to, but you still need the expertise, technology, and industry to build it. Hell NK apparently got one to go pop but they couldnt make it go BANG. Most third world nations would have a much easier time building a gun type weapon (IE little boy), but these weapons are relatively weak, large, and very wasteful of fissile material. They are also inherently dangerous. South Africa purportedly built a few in the 70's (check dates) I believe but dismantled them. Not nearly as hard but not nearly as effective a technology. Diagrams also exist of the little boy setup, but im yet to see Iran test one.

Aha!

[RealGrouchy]

Now that Wikileaks has the bomb, people will think twice about trying to shut it down!

- RG>

Re:Oooookay then....

[TheRaven64]

am I the only one who thinks that this sort of information is a little too important to "leak"? No, but no one with a moderate understanding of nuclear physics would agree with you. This is a very primitive bomb design. The principles under which it operates are very well understood and have been in school textbooks for decades. If you had a supply of weapons-grade fissionable materials then this would not provide you with any information on how to build a nuclear weapon than is already available from other sources. In fact, significantly more efficient designs are also fairly easy to obtain. Getting hold of the raw materials to build such a device is significantly harder - it's expected to take Iran 5-10 years to do so with a government-backed project.

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).

the secret that exploded

[peterxyz]

for all of those complaining about the publication of this, you're about 30 years behind the times.
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

Re:Hackaday

[Timesprout]

It's the psychological, panic-inducing effects the US Government are really for.

There, fixed that for ya.

Appears to be from Penney report...

[Goonie]

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.

Re:Perhaps I'm just not clever enough....

[smallfries]

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.

Re:Perhaps I'm just not clever enough....

[QuantumBritt]

Uh, did you forget about that little 8 year long war they had against Iraq? Seriously, before making statements you should do a little research... while one might call the Iran - Iraq war a war of aggression on Iraq's part, they can only do so up until a certain point when Iran certainly was the aggressor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Iraq_War

Re:Perhaps I'm just not clever enough....

[M-RES]

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.