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Subject: Future of Strategic Nuclear Deterrents
Roman    7/5/2004 7:31:41 PM
What systems do you think will be used for strategic nuclear deterrence in the future? Will countries retain ICBMs, or does the future lie in cruise missiles? Do nuclear bombers have any future at all? How about SSBNs or SSGNs?
 
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Roman    RE:Fusion actually is self-sustaining under sufficient pressure and temperature   7/19/2004 11:46:27 PM
"Stars are not exactly gigantic H bombs, although the hydrogen-hydrogen reaction is found in both." You are right - the nuclear fusion reactions in stars are much slower. My point was that fusion reactions are self-sustaining under some conditions, which could concievably be emulated for a very brief period of time. "If you wanted star effects, you would need to assemble a similar mass. Which is not likely to be practical in any era. For one thing, where would you get the material? For another, where would you put it, and why?" I am not talking about creating a star! What I am trying to say is that sufficiently large nuclear device (10 Gigatons) detonated underwater could conceivably create enough heat and compress the surrounding water sufficiently to cause a fusion reaction in some of the surrounding water and this would add significantly to explosive power of the weapon. Actually, I am much more confident that this is feasible than I was when I originally posted it in this thread, because I have since talked it through with a physicist here at my university and he thought that it would work.
 
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Roman    RE:are already too many radiation sources to monitor and control    7/19/2004 11:52:54 PM
Plane crashes would be nasty too and this actually also applies to military planes not just to civilian ones. Imagine your reconnaissance plane crashes over a Taliban controlled area... they might as well have been sent their radioactive material from God... And, of course, there is also the possibility that whatever container holds the hafnium does not breaks in the crash and an explosion effectively makes the plane into a dirty bomb. Ugh, unpleasant thoughts.
 
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Roman    RE:Yes, progress is being made - why not codify it in international law?    7/19/2004 11:57:45 PM
Yes, you are right - I am referring more to the general kind of codification into international law rather than mere bilateral treaties. And you correctly assert that there are rogue states and terrorist groups that do not care about any international laws or norms. These rogue states and terrorist groups are horizontal proliferators and it is indeed crucial to stop them, but vertical proliferation is important too and international law is a powerful tool to deal with that. Furthermore, decreasing vertical proliferation has a moral effect on some of the horizontal proliferators too (though definitely not on all of them). Rogue states and terrorist groups would have to be dealt with by other means...
 
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elcid    There is something wrong with the story   7/25/2004 6:38:53 AM
Aside from the tiny item that a 50 megaton blast would not be the largest in history, the technical description is internally wrong. While one can remove the "tamper" (not "tirtiary") from a bomb, and replace it with lead, one does not then get "half the yield." Instead one gets a very tiny yield - perhaps 5% in a WWII type weapon. Further, no atomic bomb has a yield of this order of magnitude. You don't get megaton monsters that way, much less hundred megaton monsters. And the weapon as described, replacing uranium with lead, is an atomic, not a hydrogen bomb. Now a hydrogen weapon does have a "sparkplug" which is an atomic bomb. And it has "secondary" and later stages. But here again, the story does not hold up internally. One would not replace "uranium" in the "tirtiary" with "lead" because there is no uranium in the tirtiary - just tritium. And to reach 20 or 30 megatons, never mind 100 megatons, one needs about 7 stages. Certainly no weapon was ever build with technology of the 1950s or 1960s producing 100 megatons on a three stage hydrogen bomb. This is a story based on the gigantic nuclear test for the Russian ABM program, retold by a non-scientist, with a political agenda. The weapon in question was deployed, and remains deployed, on 64 interceptors, surrounding Moscow. It uses radient energy to destroy nuclear material itself, electronic circuits, and possibly critical mechanical components in warheads within hundreds of km of the detonation. But you would not want to be on the ground near this "friendly, defensive" weapon when it goes off! You would go blind if your instincts prevail and you wear no protective lenses (that turn black in a fraction of a second). This weapon may do almost as much damage as a real attack, if many are used! [AA weapons are like that. The damage in Honolulu on Dec 7 1941 was substantially all US inflicted damage, from spent AA shells.]
 
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Roman    RE:There is something wrong with the story   7/25/2004 9:16:35 PM
El Cid, the story is correct. If the Atomic Central (which IMO is a reasonably reliable source) does not convince you, perhaps an article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists will? That should be credible enough. Here is the article: http://www.thebulletin.org/research/qanda/bombsize.html As to the 64 Megaton ABM warhead - I have never heard of that before you mentioned it. I am not saying it was not tested, but perhaps the info is classified? If it is open source can you provide some links or give more info on the matter?
 
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Roman    RE:There is something wrong with the story   7/25/2004 9:57:02 PM
"Aside from the tiny item that a 50 megaton blast would not be the largest in history, the technical description is internally wrong." Well, open source publications seem to regard it as the largest man-made nuclear blast in history. Some initial American estimates put this blast at 57 Megatons, but Russians put it at 50 Megatons (though during the Cold War they used the bigger American figures to achieve a greater propaganda effect, now they reverted back to using their original figures). "While one can remove the "tamper" (not "tirtiary") from a bomb, and replace it with lead, one does not then get "half the yield." Instead one gets a very tiny yield - perhaps 5% in a WWII type weapon. Further, no atomic bomb has a yield of this order of magnitude. You don't get megaton monsters that way, much less hundred megaton monsters. And the weapon as described, replacing uranium with lead, is an atomic, not a hydrogen bomb. Now a hydrogen weapon does have a "sparkplug" which is an atomic bomb. And it has "secondary" and later stages. But here again, the story does not hold up internally. One would not replace "uranium" in the "tirtiary" with "lead" because there is no uranium in the tirtiary - just tritium. And to reach 20 or 30 megatons, never mind 100 megatons, one needs about 7 stages. Certainly no weapon was ever build with technology of the 1950s or 1960s producing 100 megatons on a three stage hydrogen bomb." It was a hydrogen bomb. More accuratelly, the Tsar Bomba was a Fission-Fusion-Fission design. There is one fission stage (the primary) that is used to initiate the fusion reaction in the secondary which is generally made of lithium-hydride (the 'hydride' is of course deuterium rather than ordinary hydrogen). Lithium acts as a source for tritium for the fusion reaction, since Li7 is much more stable, storable and unlike tritium it does not readioactively decay. The secondary stage is your standard fusion reaction. You are correct that one fusion stage is insufficient to reach the explosive power of the Tsar Bomba - there are multiple fusion 'capsules' in the bomb and yes these are all separate stages strictly speaking. In order to achieve fusion, every hydrogen weapon must confine the fusion material in its place for a short fraction of a second to give it time to fuse. This is the purpose of the tamper. The tamper is a dense material that inertially confines the reacting deuterium and tritium materials for a very small fraction of a second that is nonetheless sufficient for fusion to run its course. Suitable materials include such dense elements as lead or bismuth. Another material that is very dense and suitable for the purpose is uranium 238. A tamper made of U-238, however, has an additional property that is advantageous if your aim is to increase the yield of the weapon. While U-238 is nowhere near as fissile as U-235, it still does undergo fission if 'hit' by sufficiently energetic neutrons - and these neutrons are indeed produced in the fusion reaction of the secondary (and further fusion stages). Hence, the U-238 (sometimes enriched [though not fully enriched] in U-235 to achieve higher fission efficiency) coating acts not only as a tamper, but also as a tertiary (well, strictly speaking more than tertiary, but I am lumping all fusion stages into one here and referring to them as the secondary stage, for the sake of simplicity and because I do not know how many fusion stages the Tsar Bomba actually used) stage. That's why these weapons are referred to as fission-fusion-fission devices. Of course, the fission in the tamper is not very efficient (since U-238 does not fission as efficiently as U-235 - the efficiency and explosive power can be tweaked by varying the percentage of U-235 in the predominantly U-238 tamper) and these types of weapons produce a huge amount of fallout. By replacing the U-238 tamper with a lead tamper in the Tsar Bomba, the yield was reduced enormously (experts say by half), but the fallout was reduced by several orders of magnitude.
 
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elcid    Confusion of atomic and hydrogen bomb technologies   7/26/2004 2:13:49 AM
Your discussion beginning with a fission-fusion multistage device begins well - even reading in a narrow technical sense. But in the middle something happens - which must be confusion. A tamper is used only around the core of a fission weapon. It can be made of anything dense - it need not be uranium - but if it is uranium efficiency will be maximized because it is the densest of all natural elements. In addition, you actually get some more atomic reactions - not many but some in a strit atom bomb. However, if you inject some duterium or tritium into the core at the right instant, it will cause a fusion reaction, albiet briefly and adding little to the yield directly. BUT some of those neutrons produced by the fusion will cause further fission in the U-238. [Bomb core fuel - usually both U-235 and plutonium combined - reacts to slow neutrons. But U-238 reacts to fast neutrons. Statistically speaking.] A hydrogen bomb always has this kind of "spark plug" - a boosted fission device - one in which the original fission causes a little bit of fusion which causes still more fission - and that fission in your tamper which surrounds the core. However, the rest of the bomb is NOT confined by the tamper. Instead, it is surrounded by a very very stong bomb casing. This casing is designed to reflect x rays and neutrons. It is a long tube - the spark plug is at one end - and the radiation travels down the tube - reacting with each "stage" it meets along the way - causing the tritium or deturium rich hydride to react as an additional fusion stage. It is not the density of the bomb casing that matters - it is its mechanical strength - something uranium is not ideal for - and the degree to which it reflects the radiation. Whenever the casing breaks mechanically, the bomb stops growing, as no more stages will be set off. And fusion is not a self sustaining reaction - it burns but not in a chain reaction as in fission when one is above critical mass. [What ends a fission reaction is when the critical mass flies apart. The dense tamper does help prolong that, all the while adding a bit to the reaction when a fast neutron collides with a U-238 molicule - well not then but soon thereafter.] Anyway, substituting lead for uranium in a hydrogen bomb would probably result in a "spark" too small to set of the secondary fusion stage. And one would not substitute lead for the bomb casing - which would then fly apart far too soon - again probably preventing any fusion at all - except that very first bit when the fusion fuel is injected into the fission core. The weapon as you describe it would indeed explode and mess up a building badly - and I would not want to be in that city block. But you are talking about a fizzile here - a few hundred tons yield - maybe on the order of a kiloton. So small it would not likely have been noticed on sisemographs worldwide in those days. I will look for the Bulletin material. But the Bulletin is not very consistent. It selects material on political rather than technical criteria. It refuses to accept anything that is documented to formal academic standards - see its writer's guidelines. [Maximum of 6 notes, all general sources, no proper formal citations]. If you want to say ABM systems work, they won't print you, no matter how sound your article is. If you want to say ABM systems will NOT work, they will print you, no matter how bad your arguement may be. The material on the Russian ABM test is old and published - not classified. And I think it is the same test you refer to - because an alternate estimate was identical to your 57 megatons. This is too big - it destroyed the instrumentation - and all "yield" figures are guesses based on very indirect data. This test is often referred to in technical discussions related to ABMs and to EMP weapons (because of course it had monsterous EMP effects in Asia).
 
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Roman    No confusion...    7/26/2004 8:41:36 PM
Nope, I am not confused about this. Tampers are used as jackets around fusion stages to briefly contain the explosion (and for other purposes). Here is an excellent link on fusion tampers: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-4.html#Nfaq4.4.5.4 Also, if you do not like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (which admittedly does tend to lean against NWs) here is an excellent link on the Tsar Bomba from the same site that I cited with respect to the fusion tampers: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html
 
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Roman    Largest Nuclear ABM Test   7/26/2004 9:01:50 PM
Elcid, can you give me some kind of link to that huge nuclear ABM test? I cannot find anything on it. I even tried searching for things like "64 Megatons" (one of the estimates you cited for the yield) on Google and the only things it came up with were some Star Trek sites... If you could provide some link I would be grateful. Thanks!
 
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elcid    RE:Largest Nuclear ABM Test   7/27/2004 6:53:52 AM
I don't know about the net, but I have a better resource anyway. It is probably in my physical files and/or books. The only problem is one does not search instantaneiously. Will see what I can find. I should have material on this matter. And I have a friend - a retired army biologist - who probably remembers. I do not remember the idea of a fusion tamper. It sounds unreasonable - a heavy metal would shield the radiation from reaching the fusion fuel - but maybe the idea is to have fast neutrons cause more fission released fast neutrons? This seems unwise in a bomb - the fission released are delayed in time - and we already are time constrained by the nuclear explosion - the moment the casing bursts the game is over and yield will cease to grow. But I don't remember how long we have. I do, however, have a great book with massive citations (sometimes thousands of words) from official documents. [Hard to believe it is legal, but the author went to court to get much of this material - and Oppie himself once made fools out of a Congressional inquiry by pointing out that what they thought was classified he had read verbatum from the Encyclopedia Britannica.] If the big bomb test is on the web, it should be found under hydrogen bombs, EMP weapons, and ABM warheads. It is a very old matter - possibly that is the problem. If no one ever said it on the web google cannot find it.
 
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