Posted on 07/24/2015 9:29:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
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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