On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote:
One thing that is bothering me these days are all the reports coming out of Afganistan that nuclear bomb making plans were found. Big deal. Anyone on the planet can make a nuclear device if they have the appropriate materials. The hard part is staying alive due to exposure while manufacturing the device.
If however death is not an issue then the process itself becomes easy to accomplish.
Tom Clancy did a good job of describing how to make a low-yield nuke in one of his novels, the one about a nuke in the Denver stadium. (I think it was "The Sum of All Fears.") It's been many years since I read it, but my recollection is that one of the actors gets sick. As Eric C. pointed out in his follow-up to your article, this business of "staying alive" is probably the easiest of the problems to solve. The biggest hazard is from ingestion of the materials, either from some grinding or machining stage, or liquid compounds (molding the fissionables). (The "apron" you mention at some point is almost totally beside the point. Working in a good fume hood or laminar flow hood would be a better safety precaution. Wearing a moonsuit and gloves would be extra protection. Not eating sandwiches or Doritos while mixing the stuff also helps.)
Materials ---------
4 stainless steal salad bowls (5 - 8 inch diameter) 10 pounds of U-235 (Plutonium) 1 containment cylinder in which to fit the salad bowls ? some explosives - C4 platic works best - but TNT or gun powder is acceptable.
Divide the U-235 into two five pound masses. Beat it evenly into the inside of one of your salad bowls. U-235 is malleable like gold so you should have no problem shaping it. Do the same with the other U-235 mass and shape it into the other salad bowl.
C4 explosives work best. You simply mold the C4 into the other two salad bowls. This is the most dangerous part of the project. Improper handling of C4 can cause an explosion. But gun powder is just as effective.
Why so complicated on the detonation geometry? Without doing some experiments and getting the fast ignition triggers (on the real munitions list), I'd doubt strongly that your scheme would work the first time. And gunpowder is almost guaranteed to not work.
Anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device. So the only issue in building the device is the will to die for a cause. And the only thing I find unfortunate in all of this is that there are so many causes that people are willing to die for. And war will not make those reasons go away - it will only encourage them.
It's really _not_ this easy. It took China and India a while before they successfully tested an A-bomb (many years after they had the raw materials from their reactor programs). It may have taken the South Africans and Israelis a few years after getting materials, too. So, why didn't they just hammer U-235 into stainless steel mixing bowls and do it the way "anyone on this planet can build a nuclear device," one wonders. I'd guess that the "tall pipe" version is the most buildable of the basement nukes. (In a nutshell: a tall drainpipe, perhaps 40 feet tall. Set up in an apartment building, warehouse, etc. At the base the pipe is reinforced with copious amounts of concrete. The subcritical masses are at opposite ends of the pipe. The mass on top is piled on with several hundred pounds of ballast, to "tamp" the early critical mass action. To explode the bomb, drop the mass from the top of the pipe. The critical mass is briefly contained by the concrete collar around the pipe and the inertial mass above. Is it enough to produce a real chain reaction? Well, it's all relative. Still, not very efficient.)