Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the U.S.

inference-review.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–25 of 25 posts

Re: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the U.S.

#21

Post by dragonwriter »

iab wrote: post #2

> I was told that the mushroom clouds were clearly visible from the casinos. Just warming up for Armageddon in the distance, NBD. But on another note, Bernstein says that the barrier to armament is only political, not technical. How does a nation-state that has previously not had a thermonuclear program go about designing and testing a weapon in the age of test-ban treaties? (Ignoring countries that obviously flaunt…

> How does a nation-state that has previously not had a thermonuclear program go about designing and testing a weapon in the age of test-ban treaties?

Openly defy or repudiate the treaty, if you are a party in the first place.

> Say Germany wanted to build up a weapons program - wouldn't testing be an absolute prerequisite?

Arguably not, but the main reason to have nukes is to be able to influence other state’s behavior with the implicit or explicit threat of their use, which is a lot more credible with clear demonstration of their functionality (and, also, with clear demonstration of the will to violate international norms.)

Re: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the U.S.

#22

Post by grkvlt »

iab wrote: post #8
willis936 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the same way that nations that previously tested nuclear weapons currently develop nuclear weapons: with supercomputers and ICF facilities. Making a bomb isn't very tricky. The nuclear bomb tests were a combination of learning physics and threatening adversaries. The understanding of making nuclear weapons doesn't see significant benefit from blowing up more bombs. The physics is freely available. The gist o…

I think there is a large discrepancy between hypothetically viable, and demonstrably viable.

If you only care about fission weapons, a practically viable weapon is easy, and does not require testing.

This was demonstrated by South Africa, who developed a fission weapon, using an indigenous and entirely novel isotope separation technique and no outside help. They produced a stockpile of around five weapons, with absolutely no testing. The Vela incident often referred to is outwith the relevant timescale, being in 1979 and the weapons program ran from 1984 to 1994. The devices themselves were gun-type bombs using uranium, similar to the 'little boy' (Hiroshima) design, with improvements in safety primarily.

This was as a hedge against Soviet agression in the Angolan civil war, and they were intending to detonate one of the bombs as proof of their capability if the situation ever became desperate. As a pariah state due to Apartheid, the idea was that the US and allies would be forced to abandon their arms embargos and step in to help with conventional assistance in order to prevent World War III. This never happened, and South Africa is still the only state ever to have developed a viable nuclear weapons capability and then voluntarily given it up.

The details are available in an excellent book by David Albright of ISIS (not that one, the Institute foir Science and International Security...) at https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Revis...

Re: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the U.S.

#23

Post by Animats »

willis936 wrote: post #4
iab wrote: post #2

> I was told that the mushroom clouds were clearly visible from the casinos. Just warming up for Armageddon in the distance, NBD. But on another note, Bernstein says that the barrier to armament is only political, not technical. How does a nation-state that has previously not had a thermonuclear program go about designing and testing a weapon in the age of test-ban treaties? (Ignoring countries that obviously flaunt…

Probably the same way that nations that previously tested nuclear weapons currently develop nuclear weapons: with supercomputers and ICF facilities. Making a bomb isn't very tricky. The nuclear bomb tests were a combination of learning physics and threatening adversaries. The understanding of making nuclear weapons doesn't see significant benefit from blowing up more bombs. The physics is freely available. The gist o…

Making a gun-type fission bomb, like the Hiroshima bomb, takes a lot of highly enriched uranium, but it isn't complicated. Making a plutonium implosion bomb is hard, for a number of reasons. Making a good implosion is moderately hard. It takes two kinds of explosives and lots of tricks to make it work. Plus techniques for making X-ray movies of an explosion as it happens to debug the process. Los Alamos went through tons of explosives getting that right. "The Curve of Binding Energy", by John McPhee, covers all this.

Making a fusion bomb is quite hard, and there are still parts of that which are classified. US bombs use some material called "FOGBANK", which is not only classified but so hard to make that there was a period of over a decade during which the US couldn't make it.

There's some grumbling in the nuclear establishment that there were too many smart people working on bomb designs in the 1950s and 1960s, and as a result, the designs are too complicated. This is a problem for building new bombs without testing them.

On the enrichment side, the centrifuges keep getting better. The original gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge was a mile long. Everybody who built nuclear weapons in the 1950s had to build up a huge amount of plant. Today, an enrichment facility is about the size of a WalMart SuperCenter or a medium to large data center.[1]

Laser enrichment requires even less plant, but it's hard to make it work. The technology is mostly classified, but the NRC has a self-training course on it.[2] The current leading company in that area is SILEX, in Australia. Their investor presentation indicates that silicon isotope separation, which has some use in quantum computing, has more business potential than uranium separation.

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Eunice,+New+Mexico/@32.4...

[2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A051.pdf

Re: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the U.S.

#24

Post by maybelsyrup »

iab wrote: post #2

> I was told that the mushroom clouds were clearly visible from the casinos. Just warming up for Armageddon in the distance, NBD. But on another note, Bernstein says that the barrier to armament is only political, not technical. How does a nation-state that has previously not had a thermonuclear program go about designing and testing a weapon in the age of test-ban treaties? (Ignoring countries that obviously flaunt…

> Ignoring countries that obviously flaunt it,N̶K̶ ̶&̶ ̶I̶r̶a̶n̶)

Don't forget Israel

Post reply on HN