MEDELMA@CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU (Michael Edelman) (12/12/90)
From: Michael Edelman <MEDELMA@CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU> Regarding the construction of early nuclear triggers: One of the books on the subject- McPhee's, I believe- describes the trigger as a small steel ball with holes drilled, filled with polonium and beryllium, and plugged. Implosion deformed the ball (actually a ball bearing, I believe) and produced mixing. That's for the implosion bomb. As for the difficulty of generating 25KV from batteries, it's trivial. You only need a battery and an inverter circuit, available off the shelf in an encapsulated package. The terminal you're staring at may well have a similar circuit in a different package. It's simply a DC-powered oscillator run through a step-up transformer and a voltage multiplier circuit. --mike edelman medelma@cms.cc.wayne.edu medelma@waynest1