Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbay808 | Hacker News Reader

I'm astonished that they would release this video. Even 60 years onward, this test is still beyond the capabilities of many nations and so it's surprising to me that this wouldn't remain classified. It goes into quite extensive detail on the logistics and planning and even shows footage of the bomb with panels removed.

Edit on downvotes - is my surprise at its declassification misplaced? Does every teenager these days know how to plan and carry out a 50 megaton nuclear test by reading Wikipedia?

View on HN

Does every teenager these days know how to plan and carry out a 50 megaton nuclear test by reading Wikipedia?

Not quite but closer than you might have thought, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment

The important bit being:

"though in such a case the limiting factor in developing such a weapon is not usually design difficulty but rather the procurement of material (enriched uranium)"

This paragraph refers to the simpler-to-design gun type (eg Fat Man). According to WP the three PhD guys designed a much more complicated implosion-type bomb within only 3 years with public information and only basic tools.

Sure. Still requires fuel that's a bigger problem/barrier than the design.

Fat Man is the “much more complicated” design and the guys picked it because it is more challenging.

Results of the analysis are still classified (declassified document is redacted to death) but there are some accounts claiming that Dr. Teller uncovered that the design was viable and would produce a blast within order of magnitude of the “inspiration”.

If the account above is true it means anything from low single digit kiloton range to low double digit.

But I do not think today anybody would doubt that. The biggest obstacle to fission bomb making are materials themselves. Lack of public data to calibrate would mean nothing to terrorists (1 kiloton is still terror-inducing) and nation states have no problems in accessing nuclear scientists.

Fortunately, getting enough material is what makes this lunacy impractical.

The Congo Crisis made more sense after I learned this month that they were a source of unenriched uranium.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24045858

For their role in V-J day, let's give belgium a hand!

> For their role in V-J day, let's give belgium a hand!

Was that a bleakly-relevant joke? I mean, kudos to you - but jeez, 'dark' does't begin to cover it.

When reading human history, gallows humour helps with detachment.

This begs the question: Is it illegal to design a nuclear weapon? Or any weapon for that matter, sounds like hell of a hobby. Could you outsource a modern day Kalashnikov to the third world through the daily Slack and Zoom?

Not really, there is a big framework of regulations designed specifically to make that not a thing - from international treaties to local laws. They cover all sorts of things including the materials, the development and trade of adjacent and dual-use technology and industrial capacity, etc.

>Edit on downvotes - is my surprise at its declassification misplaced?

Yes.

If you think that this is even a fraction of the data and resources needed to replicate that chain of events, then you probably seriously misjudge the difficulty faced with regards to the engineering and construction of such a device.

The teenager comment is somewhat hyperbole, I think -- but it's not necessarily wrong. The basic principals behind these devices have been public knowledge for as far as I can remember; diagrams of how they work have been in magazines like Scientific American since the mid 70s -- maybe earlier.

This "teenage knowledge" threat predates Wikipedia, that's for sure. I was sending away cash for nefarious science kits way before Wikipedia.

I don't think it's a fraction of the data and resources needed to pull it off. But if I were, say, Kim Jong Un, this video might give me enough of a sense of how many people, time, and budget I might reasonably allocate for this kind of project. That's not the kind of information that I'd likely get from Scientific American; also, even if I can find a blown-up schematic of a nuclear weapon in a magazine, no matter how detailed it is, I'll never be sure that some important "secret sauce" isn't left out of the image. Seeing hi-res footage of a real device is different in that regard.

This isn't showing you anything about the _manufacture_ of the warhead, though, and the design and manufacture is the hard bit. And today, it's mostly hard because it's _expensive_; the technology isn't all that secret.

Why should anyone care? If making larger and larger hydrogen bombs was militarily useful, people would have continued to do it. But there is actually no purpose to making the largest explosion possible, let alone literally blowing up the world which someone once claimed was theoretically possible.

Why would a bomb that is larger than needed to destroy the largest city be useful?

Besides the Tsar Bomba, there is also a Tsar Bell, the largest bell, equally as pointless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bell

Oh, and a Tsar Cannon, "largest bombard by caliber in the world": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon

One motivator for these giant bombs was the poor accuracy of the early ICBMs. The Soviet Union at one time planned to get around this with really enormous warheads and ICBMs; the Proton rocket used to launch Mir and ISS components started life as a design for a super-ICBM (though it was never deployed as such). By the time this test happened accuracy had improved enough that it was kind of pointless, and the whole thing is a bit of a historical oddity.

Both the US and Soviet Union did explore using really big fusion bombs for geo engineering (there was a bonkers plan to dig a harbour in Alaska with them, notably), but early testing of these concepts were not promising and the atmospheric test ban killed it off.

Franakly with Proton it was almost certainly a play by the design bureau to get their project funded - and everybody else did that back then.

The Tsar Bomba was never intended to be a practical weapon. Modern computing (ever had to read/sign a disclaimer for FEM software saying "I will use this to make nukes"?) combined with espionage at the time means that there is almost no chance that there is anything particularly useful contained in the footage.

I also read that, as well as it being detected by an American nuclear surveillance plane, the detonation wasn't actually publicly announced within the Soviet Union.

There are hundreds of videos of nuclear tests publicly available. They're not revealing anything here. It's arguably weird it took this long; the Soviet Union and Russia have released footage of other tests before.

> Does every teenager these days know how to plan and carry out a 50 megaton nuclear test by reading Wikipedia?

This video shows you nothing of the sort.

It's possible they are releasing it because of the current tensions between US/China/Russia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com