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I find the proliferation concerns of this technology to be rather scary--if LLNL could cobble this together in a few rush months with slide rules back in the late 50s, what could an adversary with modern computational fluid dynamics and a pile of GPUs do?

With this sort of design, you could scale a fairly small amount of fissile material into arbitrarily large outputs adding basically just lithium deuteride.

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As somebody who actually tried this — not much. You’ll need a lot of tacit information on how (thermo)nuclear weapons can be constructed, the feedback from actual engineers and experimental results, etc. I can design e.g. an implosion simulation with some open source CFD codes, but how can I verify my results without access to (really expensive) explosion testing rigs and measurement equipment? Thermonuclear weapons are a whole another story: the experimental equipment for testing radiation compression is prohibitively expensive. So, thankfully, a working nuclear program is still only possible for nation-states and extremely sophisticated organizations.

That’s totally fair—I was thinking more like a small nation-state being able to leverage a relatively small enrichment program rather than a private independent program.

I’m sure there’s all sorts of experimentally determined magic numbers that are only discoverable with testing.

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