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1994-08-24 - Re: Nuclear Weapons Material

Header Data

From: “Perry E. Metzger” <perry@imsi.com>
To: Mikolaj Habryn <dichro@tartarus.uwa.edu.au>
Message Hash: abe98d8664f51c29e96ac3a677852e288deadcb60954dbd864b5d991088804f2
Message ID: <9408241310.AA03276@snark.imsi.com>
Reply To: <199408240215.KAA22862@lethe.uwa.edu.au>
UTC Datetime: 1994-08-24 13:10:51 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 24 Aug 94 06:10:51 PDT

Raw message

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 94 06:10:51 PDT
To: Mikolaj Habryn <dichro@tartarus.uwa.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Nuclear Weapons Material
In-Reply-To: <199408240215.KAA22862@lethe.uwa.edu.au>
Message-ID: <9408241310.AA03276@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Mikolaj Habryn says:
> > 
> > Fusion bombs I thought used tritium as fuel and needed a Plutonium
> > trigger or something.  They are supposedly set off with some kind of
> > inner mirrored ball with high powered lasers.  Fission then fusion I
> > believe.
> 
> 	The plutonium trigger is set off using conventional explosives
> to implode a hollow sphere of the material. While this technique is
> superficially similar to the gun-type triggering used by U-235 fuelled
> bombs, the geometry prevents the Pu-239 from fissioning prematurely.
> 	The tritium is used as a neutron source - it releases neutrons
> when sufficiently motivated to do so.

In a fusion, or H Bomb, the tritium (which is just hydrogen with an
extra two neutrons) is that which produces the boom -- the main fuel,
as it were. Its a "neutron source" only in the weakest possible sense
-- the same way dynamite might be considered to need nitroglycerine as
a "neutron source". (I'm not sure that people outside of the bomb
building industry really know *for sure* what the geometries used in
the atomic weapon that sets off the fusion reaction.)

Perry

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