cryptoanarchy.wiki

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1994-08-25 - Re: Nuclear Weapons Material

Header Data

From: khijol!erc@apple.com (Ed Carp [Sysadmin])
To: dichro@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Mikolaj Habryn)
Message Hash: e43af958f0c91aee4ac4b94198c7f39272f2554080e8c1c9436b3476f836740d
Message ID: <m0qdXE6-0004EcC@khijol.uucp>
Reply To: <199408250414.MAA02764@lethe.uwa.edu.au>
UTC Datetime: 1994-08-25 05:32:24 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 24 Aug 94 22:32:24 PDT

Raw message

From: khijol!erc@apple.com (Ed Carp [Sysadmin])
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 94 22:32:24 PDT
To: dichro@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Mikolaj Habryn)
Subject: Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
In-Reply-To: <199408250414.MAA02764@lethe.uwa.edu.au>
Message-ID: <m0qdXE6-0004EcC@khijol.uucp>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


> > > the atomic weapon that sets off the fusion reaction.)
> > 
> > I don't understand your point.  The earliest devices used a pie shape 
> > with a wedge cut out.  The actual geometry is rather unimportant to 
> > getting a fission reaction - but it *is* important if you want to 
> > maximize your yield.
> > -- 
> 
> 	Wrong. If you are using a uranium fuelled bomb, then you are
> right. As long as you thump together two barely sub-critical masses, it
> will go boom. However, if you try this with plutonium, it will fizzle.
> In the time that it takes for a standard gun type triggering mechanism
> to operate, the plutonium will become critical, and then release most of
> it's energy harmlessly, instead of going super-critical. This is the
> reason for using fast-triggering bomb geometries.

Wrong.  If you will notice, I said "the earliest devices".  They didn't 
use plutonium for nuclear devices until much later.
-- 
Ed Carp, N7EKG    			Ed.Carp@linux.org, ecarp@netcom.com
Finger ecarp@netcom.com for PGP 2.5 public key		an88744@anon.penet.fi
If you want magic, let go of your armor.  Magic is so much stronger than
steel!        -- Richard Bach, "The Bridge Across Forever"

Thread