Posted on 07/24/2015 9:29:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
After long and difficult negotiations, an agreement was recently concluded in Vienna between Iran and six Western powers, including the United States, to curb that nation’s nuclear weapons program.
The discussions highlight two stark facts: First, that however difficult the negotiations, implementing the terms of the agreement will be equally if not more challenging. And second, that atomic weapons are relatively easy to manufacture by nations with sufficient scientific and technological expertise.
On this last point, it is worthwhile remembering the events of 70 years ago in order to better understand the issues of today. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Second World War with all of its horrors and brutalities was at last brought to an end. Those early weapons, produced in secret during the war and at great expense, were the products of one of the greatest scientific and technological enterprises of all time. We know it today by its popular name, the Manhattan Project, and it was driven by an Army general named Leslie R. Groves and under him, the development of the bomb by his scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. This unusual and unexpected partnership made possible not only the comparatively simple atomic bombs of World War II, but subsequent generations of increasingly powerful thermonuclear weapons.
We should also note that just over seven decades ago, the United States was fighting a war on multiple fronts and with private industry converted to meeting the needs of a massive war effort by producing everything from uniforms to bombers, artillery shells to tanks. Despite this all-out effort, the nation also spent two billion dollars employing thousands of talented scientists and engineers and hundreds of thousands of civilian workers, and building a network of production plants solely for an enterprise that had no sure guarantee of working: the creation of a new and destructive weapon based on the power of splitting atoms. And yet, that is exactly what America did when it created the Manhattan Engineer District in 1942, and over the next two and a half years, constructed, among other installations, a colossal plant to process uranium in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; giant reactors in Hanford, Washington, to generate plutonium; and an isolated laboratory high in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico to design and build the bombs themselves.
By good fortune, the man running the Manhattan Project was General Groves, an Army engineer who before the war oversaw construction of the new Pentagon building in record time and under budget. Smart, ambitious, and a gifted administrator, he ran the project with indefatigable energy. Also fortunate was his choice of the scientist to lead the design and development of the new bomb at the laboratory in New Mexico, the brilliant theoretical physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. Although he lacked administrative experience, Oppenheimer made up for this with an unusual intellectual versatility and ability to inspire.
Named after the mesa top it occupied, the Los Alamos Laboratory worked its way through difficult theoretical questions and challenging engineering hurdles over a period of two and a half years. Two versions of an atomic bomb were designed and built and given the nicknames Little Boy and Fat Man. In August 1945 the boy fell on Hiroshima, the man on Nagasaki. Most Americans at the time believed their use ended the war. The atomic bomb undeniably changed the course of history, and one of its legacies is that the principles and techniques developed at Los Alamos for creating a nuclear explosion are still applicable today. That knowledge—the “secret” of the atomic bomb—would not stay secret very long. Even in 1945, Groves and Oppenheimer understood that the genie was out of the bottle.
Today, eight nations are known to possess nuclear weapons: China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Other countries no doubt hope to acquire them. The recently completed negotiations in Vienna are only the latest attempt to keep the list at eight, but realistically, the fight to halt the further spread of weapons will no doubt continue far into the future.
This is the legacy of the Manhattan Project and of the partnership between general and physicist.
It’s not about how much material you have, it’s about how you detonate it. Serious yield (thermonuclear, megaton bombs) is achieved through “blow back”, you use the initial blast to get an even more critical mass on the second stage. And that, it turns out, is really hard to do.
I said that the basic physics of this is well known. It was well known in the 1940's. That isn't even one of the many the significant issues with creating a nuclear bomb.
The Norks and Paki's did not develop them. Again, go back and read the original post. Only ONE country has actually ever developed a nuclear weapon, and that is the United States. All of the others had help [Britain, France, Israel, India, China, Pakistan], spies [Russia, China] or violated the NNPT in order to get the technology [South Africa, North Korea, Iran and all of the others except Britain and Russia] or some combination of the above.
I taught nuclear physics for years to Nuclear Engineers, Technicians, and Physicists at Senior level to undergraduates. None of my students would have had the slightest idea how to build a nuclear bomb without further, graduate level and highly technical instruction. People who say this is easy to do DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.
We don't know to this day whether NoKorea has successfully detonated a Plutonium bomb. We know they are refining and stockpiling the metal, but a number of blasts observed in North Korea going back several years have all been estimated at sub-kiloton range [they've been detected via listening devices because they haven't even been powerful enough to tweak the seismometers -- at least not the civilian ones.]
Some weapons experts speculated at the time that those tests weren't even "kind of successful" low-yield. It's actually possible that they got themselves blown up improperly handling the high explosives needed for the implosion, and the results seen weren't nuclear explosions at all.
2 subcritical masses. One artillery tube. Explosives.
Yes or no professor. Yes or no.
Duh, or duh?
So I’ll take that as an affirmative. Iran will have an nuclear device inside of 2 years.
Want to take that bet?
We're better than they are.
Who will tell you when they achieve it, since you can’t read?
They’ll make it known the same way North Korea did.
2 years...you want a piece of it or not?
L
Two important things here.
Check the ethnicity of the ‘Fathers of the Nuclear Bombs’.
..Can’t see Iran willing to go that route.
Also raises the age old question of which is worse?
Being NUKED
OR
Being run by LIBERALS
Look at a picture of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 -
Then Look at pictures 70 years later).
Look at a picture of Detroit in 1964.
Then Look at pictures of Detroit 50 years later.
Answer is fairly obvious.
I’ve already told you: read what I’ve written if you’re interested in my answer to that question [or have a literate person read to you what I’ve written.]
Perhaps you are referring to the gun-type bomb design for Uranium in which a trigger is propelled at a precise, exact speed into a core.
In that case, the answer is "Maybe" because the shape of the core, the purity of the core, the size of the core, the state of the core, and the precise composition of the trigger pellet have to be as exact as the speed and accuracy of the pellet/trigger down the gun-type tube.
For the implosion-style Plutonium bomb, vastly more factors are in play such as Pu's bizarre ability to be non-magnetic for a time, then briefly magnetic and back...Pu's ability to shrink or expand by 25% in volume based on tiny changes in temperature and/or pressure...Pu's switch from being brittle to being malleable after construction...or Pu's switch from being malleable to brittle during construction.
Then there's the rusting issue, spontaneous emission issue, stray capture emission danger, and lack of precise handling or calculations during construction and assembly.
I blame Tom Clancy. He made it seem like dumb ass terrorists might pull it off, which must mean it’s easy. People forget his dumb ass terrorists started with a mostly working bomb, and then it didn’t detonate properly. Really folks, if it was that easy there’d be no point in the non-proliferation agreement and these negotiations because everybody would already have the bomb.
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