Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
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Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#2[flagged]
Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#3Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#4> One proposed version[^1] had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization.
Except... [^1] https://archive.ph/Md1YG
[^1]https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Were they just wrong by an order of magnitude or 2 because of previously unforseen limits, like air pressure? Or maybe 100MT is not the same as 600k Hiroshimas. Casually, the blast doesn't look like it's has a similar effect.
Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#5[flagged]
Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#6Incidentally, IEEE Spectrum published a fascinating interview with Dr. Garwin just a few months ago.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/richard-garwin
> At IBM, where he worked from 1952 to 1993, Garwin was a key contributor or a facilitator on some of the most important products and breakthroughs of his era, including magnetic resonance imaging, touchscreen monitors, laser printers, and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm. > > And all that was after he did the thing for which he is most famous. At age 23 and at the behest of Edward Teller, Garwin designed the very first working hydrogen bomb...
Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#7Incidentally, IEEE Spectrum published a fascinating interview with Dr. Garwin just a few months ago. https://spectrum.ieee.org/richard-garwin > At IBM, where he worked from 1952 to 1993, Garwin was a key contributor or a facilitator on some of the most important products and breakthroughs of his era, including magnetic resonance imaging, touchscreen monitors, laser printers, and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transfor…
> "and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm"
Supposedly, at Garwin's scheming, one of the creators wasn't aware the immediate application of the algorithms they were optimizing was nuclear weapons,
> "Tukey reportedly came up with the idea during a meeting of President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee discussing ways to detect nuclear-weapon tests in the Soviet Union by employing seismometers located outside the country. These sensors would generate seismological time series. However, analysis of this data would require fast algorithms for computing DFTs due to the number of sensors and length of time. This task was critical for the ratification of the proposed nuclear test ban so that any violations could be detected without need to visit Soviet facilities.[4][5] Another participant at that meeting, Richard Garwin of IBM, recognized the potential of the method and put Tukey in touch with Cooley. However, Garwin made sure that Cooley did not know the original purpose. Instead, Cooley was told that this was needed to determine periodicities of the spin orientations in a 3-D crystal of helium-3."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley–Tukey_FFT_algorithm#His...
Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#8> One proposed version[^1] had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization. Except... [^1] https://archive.ph/Md1YG [^1] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Were they just wrong by an order of magnitude or 2 because of previously unforseen limits, like air pressu…
Wikipedia says that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about 16 kilotons of TNT. 600k of those would be 16*600 megatons, or 9600 megatons. That's 96 times more than the original target yield of 100 megatons for Tsar Bomba.
I don't know if that's possible, but it makes sense that it would "reduce a region the size of France to ashes." Maybe the design had a lot of stages.
Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#9> One proposed version[^1] had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization. Except... [^1] https://archive.ph/Md1YG [^1] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Were they just wrong by an order of magnitude or 2 because of previously unforseen limits, like air pressu…
Wikipedia says that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about 16 kilotons of TNT. 600k of those would be 16*600 megatons, or 9600 megatons. That's 96 times more than the original target yield of 100 megatons for Tsar Bomba. I don't know if that's possible, but it makes sense that it would "reduce a region the size of France to ashes." Maybe the design had a lot of stages.
[deleted]
Re: Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
#10> One proposed version[^1] had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization. Except... [^1] https://archive.ph/Md1YG [^1] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Were they just wrong by an order of magnitude or 2 because of previously unforseen limits, like air pressu…
Wikipedia says that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about 16 kilotons of TNT. 600k of those would be 16*600 megatons, or 9600 megatons. That's 96 times more than the original target yield of 100 megatons for Tsar Bomba. I don't know if that's possible, but it makes sense that it would "reduce a region the size of France to ashes." Maybe the design had a lot of stages.
IIRC there is no hard limit on the size of a hydrogen bomb. That said many small nukes operating as a cluster cover more area for the same material due to the inverse cubed law.