ee163cz (04/04/83)
Are there any experienced nuclear warhead designers out there? I would
like a minor point cleared up:
There seems to be a common belief (recently expressed in an article in
the "Opinion" section of the \L.A. Times/, and, so I hear, on that "Special
Bulletin" thing on TV) that nuclear warheads are subject to sympathetic
detonation: that an attempt to destroy a nuclear warhead by violent means,
such as dynamite, will result in a *nuclear* explosion.
It has always been my impression that fission bombs (such as the fission
trigger for a fusion bomb) are marvelously finicky beasts, requiring near-
perfect synchronization of many detonators to get a halfway decent yield
(typically ~20 detonators synchronized to within ~300 ns). This implies that
an asymmetric detonation (any *not* initiated by the firing circuit) would
cause a modest-sized chemical explosion and a nasty great plume of plutonium
oxide, uranium oxide, and (in the case of a thermonuclear bomb) tritiated
water; while hardly good for the health of those downwind, this would be
vastly less destructive than even a small nuclear explosion.
Is this correct? Was it ever tested, back in the good old days of
unrestrained testing? Any further information or comments?
(not (afraid (to use) (parentheses))),
Eric J. Wilner,
sdcsvax!sdccsu3!ee163czfaustus (04/05/83)
I'm no nuke designer, but as I understand it, a bomb made with Uranium (I forget the isotope #) can be detonated very easily, as all you need is a lot of uranium to come into close proximity reasonably fast. But with plutonium, you have to cause the critical mass to be formed much faster as the stuff tends to go off before a chain reaction involving most of the material can begin and it just blows the stuff apart and creates a big plutonium cloud, etc. That is why it is infinitely less difficult to build bombs out of uranium than plutonium. Wayne