I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb - has also been carried out? How the Teller-Ulam design works has been public for a long time...
But the Teller Ulam designs are never complete, always redacted, obviously. You still gotta reverse engineer it.
Examples.
- initiators in fission devices
- explosive lenses in fission devices (what’s the exact mix/shape/required explosive payload?
- large scale manufacture of high grade plutonium. What’s the exact effect of plutonium purity on yield/function?
- how effective of a reflector is required for the teller ullman design? What’s the effect of manufacturing error on the ellipses?
There are more, but any one of these questions would require time, money, and expertise to resolve.
1. Using a much larger fission yield then necessary
2. Using a much larger/denser elispes than necessary to avoid manufacturing errors becoming problematic.
3. Using a much more massive reflector than necessary.
The goal of the Ivy Mike test was to validate the concept of the design - not necessarily to validate that it could be made into a practical bomb. I'm not sure if its ever been revealed wether the filler for the shell has any significance towards the final device.
And then there's the theoretical possibility of designing a thermonuclear device without the A-bomb part. I remember skimming through a paper from someone from CERN about it; https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071.pdf is the guy, but I'm not sure that's the exact paper.