A 1967 experiment that proved anyone can design a nuclear weapon
amusingplanet.com
amusingplanet.com
A few decades later, the theories of nuclear physics had advanced considerably, IC computers were available for rapid calculations, the algorithms required for these calculations were present in textbooks, as were the results of many computations that did not have to be redone.
Today, designing every aspect of a nuclear weapon, from the actual weapon itself to the machines and factories required to manufacture them, is even easier. The only real deterrent to countries building nuclear weapons are political in nature. Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to, but thankfully we are limited to about a dozen of them.
This is something to reflect on, when arguing that the spread of bad technology, especially one that does require many millions to manufacture, cannot be stopped.
Also, acquiring the material has always been the hard part. It requires nuclear reactors then reprocessing the waste to get plutonium. Or enriching uranium to get U-235.
There is term, nuclear latency, for countries that could easily develop nuclear weapons. Some identified ones are Japan, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Australia, Argentina, South Korea, and Taiwan. Japan is special case with 50 tons of plutonium.
If the article is correct in that a couple of physics grad students could make a design in the 60s that could be made in an average machine shop, im sure its the case Canada retains the ability.
Not sure our economy wouldnt collapse as a result though.
> Back in the 50s, there were two schools of thought - that the ideas could be kept secret, and that the material could be locked up. Now? Well, hopefully the materials can still be locked up, but we all have our doubts about that.
This experiment showed that designing the bomb was the easy part, but manufacturing is still a challenge. Even today, nuclear nonproliferation is largely about making it hard to acquire enough fissile material to make a weapon. Everything from the structure of anti-nuclear treaties to things like Stuxnet is designed around making it impractical to actually manufacture a nuclear weapon, even if you have the design.
> Probably over a hundred countries could do it very rapidly if they wanted to
Only if "rapidly" is measured in years to decades in any reasonable scenario.
Which may stop becoming hard if country like Russia decides thar it has nothing to loose and will start selling.
They've already demonstrated a willingness for its materials to be used obviously on foreign soil with the barest pretense of deniability. I can't imagine they'd sweat too much if somebody set off a dirty bomb, and the willingness to take direct action in response isn't guaranteed by NATO.
I suppose it's somewhat up to how willing China and Iran are to ignore such an obvious act. The thing that actually keeps me up isn't their real response, but Russia's assumption of what it will be. Russia's predictive powers seem to err towards 'what we want is the right idea' more than 'we can actually get away with this', and they've simply taken advantage of tolerance more than weakness/fear.
If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it. Again. And will pay far more than any other nation is willing to pay for the stuff.
I do not think Russia will sell it to the US as the whole point of such exercise would be some form of strategic nuclear alliance with other countries. This way they can be protected from being bombed / invaded into "democracy" / "petrodollar" / whatever else.
IIRC they were left with a large amount of weapons-grade material and finished pits even after those programs concluded, and it wouldn't come as a big surprise to hear they've restarted production at some point. Even if they were that tight on material, they have around 6000 warheads and each of those has a Pu pit that could be proliferated, and a regional nuclear power wouldn't need that many to be viable.
> If Russia decides to start selling nuclear material again, the US will buy it
If Russia were to do so, chances are they'd want to prop up a regional nuclear power somewhere for a geopolitical advantage, not primarily cash. The US would certainly not get to make an offer like they used to back in the 90s.
If you have one nuclear weapon, you can probably get away with setting up an enrichment framework to produce more without sweating too much.
He had all kinds of things: stun guns, flamethrower, club etc.
The details are kind of secondary to a point someone made in the comments:
"This guy has clearly demonstrated that it's trivial to do all of the things necessary to build these things and take over an airplane. The fact that no one has done so in the past couple years has made me seriously question if:
a. anyone is trying (probably not)
b. given (a), do we really need all of this security theater?"
The original post reminds me of the above.
People sat still because a "standard" airplane hijacking meant going to some odd airport while a bunch of "freedom fighters" got their 15 minutes of fame and then everybody on the plane got safely released a week or two later.
Once people realized that the 9/11 hijackings instead were suicide runs, the "tribal knowledge" broke and people didn't sit still anymore (see: the fourth plane on 9/11 or the shoe bomber).
Even if it's as poor as NK, the guy who commands it can have more material riches than most of us can really consider
Most dangerous tech is more a "temptation to misuse" rather than a largely unusable (but effective) threat to wave around like a nuke or a biological WMD.
At least we did when I was studying for my Applied Physics degree in the mid 70s. It was not regarded as even slightly controversial that we should do so nor that it was especially difficult. It was simply one of the problems set in the nuclear physics course.
Of course we didn't go into the same degree of detail as Dobson, Pipkorn, and Selden and our solutions would probably not have been as effective but that was mostly because it was the thought process rather than the ultimate result that was important.
He was a young physicist at the Manhattan Project and told us stories of that as well… like the worry of igniting the oxygen of the planet’s atmosphere, how he didn’t worry being at blast site but grew concerned the farther he got (but inside dangerous radius), how the guards lost their shit and dropped their guns and ran when it went off (and the physicists cheer and looked at the panels instead of the slit window).
Good times.
We got lucky with nuclear chain reaction, but who knows what weapons of mass destruction will become possible with further advances in physics, biology, material science, AI. A discovery that will make it possible for a small group of extremists to destroy the human civilization may be the Great Filter.
Plutonium is the element with the highest atomic number to occur in nature. Neutrons are in abundance in supernova, so heavy elements like plutonium can be created in copious quantities. Trace quantities arise in natural uranium-238 deposits when uranium-238 captures neutrons emitted by decay of other uranium-238 atoms. Plutonium is separated from uranium and other transuranium elements by subjecting an aqueous solution in dilute nitric acid of the elements to be separated to electrolytic extraction by counter-current or cross-current ion migration in the presence of a complexing agent, preferably acetic acid or a mixture of hydrofluoric acid with an alkali metal fluoride, until plutonium and the other elements present accumulate in separate portions of the solution which are thereafter separately withdrawn.[1]
Or the strong anthropic principle is valid.
For anyone else interested:
That reminds me of a friend being raided by police some 30+ years ago because he published instructions how to create explosives online. He had copied some texts from a very old book that was not copyrighted anymore and, which he, a minor at that time, found in his public library. Fortunately, he never went to trial for that and his rather scientific parents were pretty understanding.
I, for one, don't wish to democratize access to nuclear weapons. Let's keep it so that only nation states willing to maintain them, have them. Maintenance seems to be about $10,000,000/year.
> The duo was banned from consulting classified research but anything they produced—diagrams and notes—automatically became classified. [...] Finally, after a presentation at Livermore, a senior researcher named Jim Frank pulled them aside and told them that the experiment was a resounding success. Had it been constructed, Jim told them, it would have made a pretty impressive bang as large as Hiroshima."
This does not pass the smell test. People who work with classified information are absolutely paranoid. This Jim Frank guy was very likely not allowed to disclose the result of the experiment to anyone without a clearance, including the "duo".
Evidence consistent with this is that they were allowed to design experiments and get results of them back. So they were given classified info just in a very controlled way.
In theory, yes. In practice, meh.
Facts
I understood that hundreds of explosives experts were involved in designing the shaped charge that created the compressed plutonium critical mass.
Restraining proliferation was simply impossible, if the bar was this low.
Counterproliferation is a tireless and thankless profession. The term for technologies that can be used for good or evil are generally called "dual use". One of the common ones is HF. Hydrogen Fluoride can be used in the uranium enrichment process as well as in refining gasoline/petrol. There have been no new oil refineries built in the US in the past half century, yet more gasoline, and higher octane fuel, has been produced (in the US) while closing some refineries. HF is used in a large number of industrial processes, I merely listed 2 which Iran would love to have. Their gasoline refineries are working with 1960s level technology, which burns up most of the crude oil they extract. Supplying them with HF would let them modernize their refineries to the point where they could export far more crude. Or let them make "yellowcake" for refining into highly enriched uranium. I'm aware that no sample of enriched uranium collected by IAEA shows enrichment past what is needed for their domestic nuclear reactors (about 4% enriched for power reactors and 20% for the one that makes radioactive chemotherapy stuff).
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [0] says that signatories of the treaty are forbidden from transferring dual-use materials & technologies to countries that have not signed the treaty. This was why a Bush-era trade deal with India [1] was so controversial. Neither India (nor Pakistan, nor Israel) have signed the NPT.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_States_Ci...
Two hemispheres of accurately machined fissile material, a vacuum pump, some really solid steel tubing, and some TNT will make a bomb.
But yes, nuclear weapons design peculiarities and simulations are a sort of my hobby, and a very interesting one.
They went out of their way not to hire people with knowledge of nuclear physics.