At 09:37 AM 10/6/97 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote:
At 3:01 AM -0700 10/6/97, Peter Trei wrote:
The plutonium cores of thermonuclear devices have a limited shelf life - he claimed 6 years, which jibes with what I've heard from other open sources. Fission products build up in the cores which can poison a chain reaction. Thus all Pu based devices need to have the cores periodically removed and replaced with new ones, while the old ones have to go through a non-trivial reprocessing stage to remove the fission products.
I think this comment is in error. Plutonium has a half life on the order of 250,000 years, so very little decay products would build up in 6 years. The tritium used in thermonuclear weapons has a much shorter half life, and would need to be replaced about that often.
One of the decay products of tritium (half-life: 12.5 years) is Helium-3, which aggressively absorbs neutrons and poisons the fission reaction of the plutonium. If one has access to more tritium, which is commercially available for about US $50,000 per gram, the existing tritium can be purified and combined with the new tritium to bring the bomb back to full power. If someone has the resources to obtain the bomb in the first place, refreshing the tritium probably wouldn't be a major problem. Jonathan Wienke What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is too hard to understand? (From 2nd Amendment, U.S. Constitution) PGP 2.6.2 RSA Key Fingerprint: 7484 2FB7 7588 ACD1 3A8F 778A 7407 2928 DSS/D-H Key Fingerprint: 3312 6597 8258 9A9E D9FA 4878 C245 D245 EAA7 0DCC Public keys available at pgpkeys.mit.edu. PGP encrypted e-mail preferred. Get your assault crypto before they ban it! US/Canadian Windows 95/NT or Mac users: Get Eudora Light + PGP 5.0 for free at http://www.eudora.com/eudoralight/ Get PGP 5.0 for free at http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pgp-form.html Non-US PGP 5.0 sources: http://www.ifi.uio.no/pgp/ http://www.heise.de/ct/pgpCA/download.shtml ftp://ftp.pca.dfn.de/pub/pgp/V5.0/ ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/pc/win95/pgp ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/mac/pgp http://www.shopmiami.com/utopia.hacktic.nl/pub/replay/pub/pgp/pgp50/win/ RSA export-o-matic: print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`