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RE: [casi] bombs and such



G'day Roger and everyone else,

I'm not a physicist, I'm a historian, but I'm familiar with the history of
how the current lot of statist criminals shysters acquired WMDs.

The answer is, as usual 'it depends'. Once you've refined your uranium,
uranium bombs are very simple - indeed, give me 100kg of weapons-grade
uranium, six months, and ten million dollars, and I could probably make one
myself, not that it would be very efficient. The Hiroshima bomb was a
uranium bomb: the design was not tested beforehand because Oppenheimer and
co were completely confident that it would work as planned. The South
African A bombs were the same, and they do not appear to have been tested
either.

The recent IISS report is a therefore a red herring - of course Saddam can
make a bomb in a few months given some crucial ingredients. The same is true
of half the governments on the planet.

Nagasaki bombs, plutonium implosion devices, are complex and much harder to
build: they would probably need testing if you wanted to make sure they
would work. The advantage of plutonium is that once you've got a reactor and
a reprocessing plant, you can make lots of them: uranium bombs require less
of a effort to set up, but reprocessing plants will only give you enough of
the stuff for one every six months or so.

Hydrogen bombs, fusion devices, are harder still, and you almost certainly
have to test an a-bomb before you can be sure about how it works well enough
to act as a trigger for the fusion bomb. So - it's highly unlikely that any
low-budget bomb can be made to yield more than 50 kilotons without some
serious testing and development. The Stalinists got 250kt out of one once,
but that involved a test and development programme that was hard to miss.

So - you don't necessarily need to test an a-bomb to be pretty confident
that it's going to work.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: VnStroope@aol.com
To: soc-casi-discuss@lists.cam.ac.uk
Sent: 13/09/02 14:21
Subject: [casi] bombs and such


[ Presenting plain-text part of multi-format email ]

Morning/Afternoon/Evening,
I was wondering if any of you nuclear physicists might know whether or
not SH
would have to conduct N-tests prior to having a functioning bomb.  I
received
good info from Glen R. on the aluminum tubes, but was thinking that if
nuclear tests were required then geological 'listening' stations would
pick
it up...yes? No?


Roger Stroope
Peace is a Human Right
Austin College


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To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk
All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk


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