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.)
On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Tim May wrote:
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.)
I very much doubt terrorist would build an efficient bomb. Non of what we discussed is effcient. Your pipe idea is a very interesting example. But I think the point is made that harm can be done. Even if the mass does not go critical - it still means a few city blocks that will be inconvenienced from the resulting radiation. You pipe certainly would not go boom - but it would leave a mess of radioactivity in the area. regards joe -- The dot.GOD Registry, Limited http://www.dot-god.com/
At 12:24 AM 11/17/2001 -0800, Tim May wrote:
On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote:
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.)
Interestingly enough, the United States government conducted a controlled experiment called the Nth Country Experiment to see how much effort was actually required to develop a viable fission weapon design starting from nothing. In this experiment, which ended on 10 April 1967, three newly graduated physics students were given the task of developing a detailed weapon design using only public domain information. The project reached a successful conclusion, that is, they did develop a viable design (detailed in the classified report UCRL-50248) after expending only three man-years of effort over two and a half calendar years. In the years since, much more information has entered the public domain so that the level of effort required has obviously dropped further. This experiment established an upper limit on the required level of effort that is so low that the hope that lack of information may provide even a small degree of protection from proliferation is clearly a futile one. http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq4.html steve
on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:24:31AM -0800, Tim May (tcmay@got.net) wrote:
On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote:
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.
This analysis neglects consideration of several points:
- Nation-states (even authoritarian ones) will likely want to create
both a sustained program, not merely crank out a few crude nukes,
and preserve the talent involved. One-offs are almost always easier
to complete than a production effort, but the lowered total cost is
offset by a higher unit cost. The terrorist organization can
accomplish its goals with crude tactics and marginally effective
devices. Credible military threat isn't as simple.
- Credible military weapons have minimum requirements of both efficacy
-- efficient use of supercritical energy -- and predictability --
having the damned thing go off in the silo / bunker / hanger /
munitions dump rather than the chosen target isn't particularly
useful.
Tighter constraints => Longer fulfillment time.
The original US project, as described by Feynman, involved much
radiation exposure and high risks of criticality incidents at Oak Ridge,
some of which are documented in his biographical essay collections. The
Hanford reservation is still a glowing waste zone, much of which greatly
postdates a fairly deep understanding of radiation hazards.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self
On Saturday, November 17, 2001, at 03:29 PM, Karsten M. Self wrote:
- Credible military weapons have minimum requirements of both efficacy -- efficient use of supercritical energy -- and predictability -- having the damned thing go off in the silo / bunker / hanger / munitions dump rather than the chosen target isn't particularly useful.
Tighter constraints => Longer fulfillment time.
The original US project, as described by Feynman, involved much radiation exposure and high risks of criticality incidents at Oak Ridge, some of which are documented in his biographical essay collections.
I knew Feynman (*) and I knew the main survivor or the criticality accident at Los Alamos. (Klein, who survived "ticking the dragon's tail" and had annual tests done for the rest of his life, which just ended a couple of years ago.) You are overstating the "high risks of criticality incidents," I think strongly. (* This should mean something to you: we had him over for dinner at our place on Camino del Sur, I.V.) Feynman wasn't even involved in that end of the physics. A couple of deaths happened, which is hardly surprising given the speed and magnitude of the war effort. More Americans died when a particular truck hit a land mine. More Americans probably died in Los Alamos when their trucks ran off the roads into the ravines. Get some perspective.
The Hanford reservation is still a glowing waste zone, much of which greatly postdates a fairly deep understanding of radiation hazards.
Peace.
Fuck your "Peace" bullshit. You are spouting nonsense with your "glowing waste zone" idiocy. I lived west of the Hanford plant for a few years and had occasion to measure the radioactivity levels of samples. The ash from the eruption of Mt. St. Helens was hotter than all but a very few small pockets of soil in the Tri-City Area. You should cut down on the bullshitting. Everytime I glance --Tim May "You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged." - -Michael Shirley
on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 10:17:28PM -0800, Tim May (tcmay@got.net) wrote:
On Saturday, November 17, 2001, at 03:29 PM, Karsten M. Self wrote:
- Credible military weapons have minimum requirements of both efficacy -- efficient use of supercritical energy -- and predictability -- having the damned thing go off in the silo / bunker / hanger / munitions dump rather than the chosen target isn't particularly useful.
Tighter constraints => Longer fulfillment time.
The original US project, as described by Feynman, involved much radiation exposure and high risks of criticality incidents at Oak Ridge, some of which are documented in his biographical essay collections.
I knew Feynman (*) and I knew the main survivor or the criticality accident at Los Alamos. (Klein, who survived "ticking the dragon's tail" and had annual tests done for the rest of his life, which just ended a couple of years ago.) You are overstating the "high risks of criticality incidents," I think strongly.
(* This should mean something to you: we had him over for dinner at our place on Camino del Sur, I.V.)
One of my regrets is never having met Feynman. I've enjoyed his works.
Feynman wasn't even involved in that end of the physics. A couple of deaths happened, which is hardly surprising given the speed and magnitude of the war effort. More Americans died when a particular truck hit a land mine. More Americans probably died in Los Alamos when their trucks ran off the roads into the ravines. Get some perspective.
The risks I'm referring to are those resulting in his visits to Oak Ridge at which he found that workers didn't know of, let alone understand, the concept of criticality. I believe the issue was covered at more depth in _Surely You Must be Joking_ or _What do You Care What Other People Think_, but I've just got Gleick's biography _Genius_ handy. P. 198-199. It's explicit that Feynman was part of the assessment and solution of the situation: At Oak Ridge, where the first batches of enriched uranium were acculating, a few officials began to consider some of the problems that might arise. One letter that made its way to Los Alamos from Oak Ridge opened, "Dear Sir, At the present time no provisions have been made in the 9207 Area for stopping reactions resulting from the bringing together by accident of an unsafe quantity of material...." Would it make sense, asked the writer -- a plant superintendent with the Tennessee Eastman Corporation -- to install some kind of advanced fire-extinguishing equipment, possibly using special chemicals? [Robert] Oppenheimer recognized the peril waiting in such questions. He brought in [Edward] Teller and Emilio Segre, head of the experimental division's radioactivity group. Segre paid an inspection visit, other thorists were assigned, and finally the problem was turned over to Fenyman, with his expertise in critical-mass calculations. [A situation exacerbated by storage of "wet" uranium -- water being an effective damper, lowering requirements for a critical episode.] ....Through dozens of rooms in a series of buildings Feynman saw drums with 300 gallons, 600 gallons, 3,000 gallons....He relaized that the plant was headed toward a catastrophe. At some point the buildup of uranium would case a nuclear reaction that would release heat and radioactivity at near-explosive speed....He laid out an detailed program for ensuring safety. He also invented a practical method...that would let engineers make a conservative approximation, on the spoot, of the safe levels of bomb material stored in various geometrical layouts. A few people, long afterward, thought he had saved their lives. A more recent incident of similar nature was the Oct. 1, 1999, Tokaimura, Japan incident in which at least 19 workers were exposed to radiation from a critical mass of enriched uranium nuclear fuel, later reports put the number as high as 667 workers and residents. http://ens.lycos.com/ens/sep99/1999L-09-30-04.html http://www.physicstoday.com/pt/vol-53/iss-12/p61a.html Radiation levels reportedly reached 15,000 times normal levels 1.2 miles from the site, too high to allow worke to approach the accident site. Residents within a 10 kilometer (six mile) radius of the plant have been told to stay indoors. The order affects close to 300,000 people. About 160 were evacuated. Two workers in the incident died as a result of radiation exposure, Hisashi Ouchi, December 22, 1999, Masato Shinohara April 27, 2000. The third worker most directly exposed to the incident, Yutaka Yokokawa, was released from hospital in December, 1999. The direct cause of the Tokaimura incident appears to have been corporate corner (and cost) cutting, sanctioned by the plants owners to the extent it was part of documented procedure: http://www.joewein.de/tokaimura.htm The accident happened when workers preparing nuclear fuels mixed uranium oxide with nitric acid using a stainless steel container instead of a mixing apparatus. This shortcut was described in an illegal operating manual drafted by the company. The manual had never been approved by the supervising ministry, as was legally required. The procedure violated some of the most basic safety requirements that were well known in the nuclear industries since the early 1940s. By circumventing the mixing apparatus an excessive amount of nuclear fuel could be inserted at any one time, which lead to a nuclear chain reaction. Most likely the illegal shortcut was an attempt to save costs in order to be more competitive with foreign fuel suppliers. The shortcut had been used for seven or eight years before the accident happened. The three workers were performing this task for the first time and were wearing t-shirts instead of protective clothing and the required film badges to measure radioactive exposure.
The Hanford reservation is still a glowing waste zone, much of which greatly postdates a fairly deep understanding of radiation hazards.
You are spouting nonsense with your "glowing waste zone" idiocy.
I lived west of the Hanford plant for a few years and had occasion to measure the radioactivity levels of samples. The ash from the eruption of Mt. St. Helens was hotter than all but a very few small pockets of soil in the Tri-City Area.
The issue under discussion is long-term contamination resulting from
military nuclear projects. Contamination at the Hanford facility has
been well documented; one quick cite:
http://www.whistleblower.org/www/hanford.htm
Hanford waste disposal practices throughout its production history
were horrendously shoddy. Government officials estimate that as much
as 450 billion gallons of contaminated liquid wastes were dumped to
the soils. As a result, the groundwater under more than 85 square
miles of the site is contaminated above current standards. Some of
the most radioactive materials were stored in underground tanks,
constructed of concrete and containing a carbon steel liner. Of the
177 underground tanks, 69 are acknowledged to have failed so far,
and to have leaked radioactive and chemically toxic solutions to the
soils, where they have migrated to the groundwater which feeds the
Columbia River.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self
A propaganda weapon doesn't have to work, it just has to present a threat of working to people who may or may not understand how it is meant to work. It doesn't have to be a credible military weapon. A kamikaze airliner isn't a credible *military* weapon against anyone who can afford artillery. That didn't stop them though. The tall pipe that others mentioned would work well enough to scare people - all you need to do is find a way of convincing others that you've done it. One idea was to set one up in a tall block of flats. You know the sort where there is a 6-inch gap between flights of stairs in the stairwell, so if you stand at the top and look down you see right to the basement. There are abandoned 19 or 20 story blocks in grotty suburbs of London with stairwells like that, I bet the same is true of most big cities. You only have to break in for a single day. You set a number of lumps of U one above the other in such a way that when a higher one falls onto one below it will take it with it - maybe just tie them to the railings with thread, and put some old metal plates in the way to stop them bouncing out of the stack. Use lumps of lead for testing. The topmost one can be released by any simple mecahnism. You then assert publically that when the top one is dropped they will all cascade down and assemble a critical mass on the floor below. Hey presto, one big propaganda coup, one mass panic and evacuation of big city. The building will probably still be standing after it goes off, or fails to, but who will want to be first in? Ken Brown "Karsten M. Self" wrote:
on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:24:31AM -0800, Tim May (tcmay@got.net) wrote:
On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote:
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.
This analysis neglects consideration of several points:
- Nation-states (even authoritarian ones) will likely want to create both a sustained program, not merely crank out a few crude nukes, and preserve the talent involved. One-offs are almost always easier to complete than a production effort, but the lowered total cost is offset by a higher unit cost. The terrorist organization can accomplish its goals with crude tactics and marginally effective devices. Credible military threat isn't as simple.
- Credible military weapons have minimum requirements of both efficacy -- efficient use of supercritical energy -- and predictability -- having the damned thing go off in the silo / bunker / hanger / munitions dump rather than the chosen target isn't particularly useful.
exactly right Ken .. as i said before to Tim May - propaganda is the key. Example - antrax theatre. i must admit i'm warming up to Tim May's tall pipe means of attaining critical mass - much easier then playing with explosive and timing devices - my only question is do our experts see a problem with that means of delivery? regards joe On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Ken Brown wrote:
A propaganda weapon doesn't have to work, it just has to present a threat of working to people who may or may not understand how it is meant to work. It doesn't have to be a credible military weapon. A kamikaze airliner isn't a credible *military* weapon against anyone who can afford artillery. That didn't stop them though.
The tall pipe that others mentioned would work well enough to scare people - all you need to do is find a way of convincing others that you've done it. One idea was to set one up in a tall block of flats. You know the sort where there is a 6-inch gap between flights of stairs in the stairwell, so if you stand at the top and look down you see right to the basement. There are abandoned 19 or 20 story blocks in grotty suburbs of London with stairwells like that, I bet the same is true of most big cities. You only have to break in for a single day. You set a number of lumps of U one above the other in such a way that when a higher one falls onto one below it will take it with it - maybe just tie them to the railings with thread, and put some old metal plates in the way to stop them bouncing out of the stack. Use lumps of lead for testing.
The topmost one can be released by any simple mecahnism. You then assert publically that when the top one is dropped they will all cascade down and assemble a critical mass on the floor below. Hey presto, one big propaganda coup, one mass panic and evacuation of big city. The building will probably still be standing after it goes off, or fails to, but who will want to be first in?
Ken Brown
"Karsten M. Self" wrote:
on Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:24:31AM -0800, Tim May (tcmay@got.net) wrote:
On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:20 PM, !Dr. Joe Baptista wrote:
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.
This analysis neglects consideration of several points:
- Nation-states (even authoritarian ones) will likely want to create both a sustained program, not merely crank out a few crude nukes, and preserve the talent involved. One-offs are almost always easier to complete than a production effort, but the lowered total cost is offset by a higher unit cost. The terrorist organization can accomplish its goals with crude tactics and marginally effective devices. Credible military threat isn't as simple.
- Credible military weapons have minimum requirements of both efficacy -- efficient use of supercritical energy -- and predictability -- having the damned thing go off in the silo / bunker / hanger / munitions dump rather than the chosen target isn't particularly useful.
-- The dot.GOD Registry, Limited http://www.dot-god.com/
participants (5)
-
baptista＠pccf.net -
Karsten M. Self -
Ken Brown -
Steve Schear -
Tim May