posted on September 27, 2001 01:29:54 PM new
And if you can understand a standard text book on nuclear engineering such as you need to be able to run a nuclear power plant then it becomes easy from published data of scattering cross sections and mean free path to calculate how big a mass of any isotope will be critical and how fast it must be assembled to make a supercritical mass for a weapon. We are talking 1940's technology here. That is the nature of science. You can't teach how to do only the good stuff and not have people know how to do the bad also.
You can make poison gas from bleach and toilet bowl cleaner. Sorry to say some people do by accident.
posted on September 27, 2001 01:36:35 PM new
I don't know.... it takes quite a techno structure to make an atomic bomb that works, and another techno structure for an ICBM.
The patent office is a short cut that saves years of research. Research which we may detect and destroy the support systems of.
posted on September 27, 2001 02:11:46 PM new
It is easy to make a U235 bomb that will work - but it is hard to make one light enough and rugged enough to put on a rocket or artillery shell. If you can deliver the thing in a F350 ford truck you are OK.
You have to assemble a critical mass of U235 at about 4000 feet per second to make sure you attain super criticality. To do that is easy if you propel the components at each other in gun barrel type set up.
Plutonium is much more difficult to assemble.
The usual implosion type assembly requires
machining a very difficult toxic metal into very accurate shapes and the forming and fusing of the explosive charges require a good knowledge of electronics to match the inductance and capcitance of all the firing circuits exactly so there is a simultaneous ignition of all the charges.
If you fail to assemble the mass quickly enough you have the energy release scatter the metal before the chain reaction has consumed the majority of the fuel. There is such a narrow time window for super citicality with Plutonium that you need an initiating neutron source because the metal may not have a spontaneous initiating fission happen in the right geometry within the time frame. Then you get a "wet firecracker".
posted on September 27, 2001 06:24:59 PM new
Yeah the fallout would still be as bad or WORSE long term. Just a lot lower yield of heat and prompt radiation. If you "burn" all the fuel you end up with a lot of very hot midweight isotopes like cesium and strontium but most of them decay with a half life of a few weeks. But if you vaporize a large percenatage of the plutonium without fissioning it you end up with an area contaminated with it and other transuranics generated by neutron absorbsion that will be lethal for thousands of years. Yuck.
posted on September 28, 2001 08:57:25 PM new
Maybe these weren't going to be use for Mass Destruction on the USA, but to be launch by Iraq into the Saui & Kuwait Oil Fields.
It seems that Saddam Hussein & Bin Laden are playing the same game. Just differrent chess pieces.
With the destruction of two World Trade Centers came a 100 Billion Dollar Price Tag!
