Quoted:
Quoted: Anybody who has studied nuclear physics in college can come up with the formula for a nuclear weapon. They're really not that difficult to design anymore. The hard part was PIONEERING the designs. These days the hard part is obtaining the weapons-grade plutonium.
edited to add: Still, that isn't very smart. Who ever accused the CIA of being smart about the way they do things? I guarantee it was some bumbling beaurocrat who altered the formula, not a nuclear weapons engineer.
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True, the basic physics are very easy now, but being handed a set of engineering blueprints for a proven design is a gold mine! With modern CNC machine tools the high precision parts are easy to make.
What concerns me is the idea of passing on a Russian design. The Iranians, (and the Pakistanis, Syrians, NK), use a Chinese design, big ,heavy and crude which limits the range of their missles. Russian bombs are much smaller and more sophisticated and give more bang for your buck.
ANdy
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I read an article by a professor of nuclear physics some time back who wanted to know how long it would take to design a workable nuclear weapon from scratch. Without any further instruction, he told a first-year engineering student to go to the library and see if he could come up with a workable design.
Forty hours later, the student was back with a design that the prof determined was entirely workable, and could be made from ordinary products fairly easily available to anyone (except for the fissionable material.)
The design consisted of an old howitzer barrel, which could be had at various places. It was capped at one end and a lump of fissionable material would be placed down at that end. On the other end, he put another cap with another block of fissionable material, sitting on top of a nice lump of dynamite. This design was to be detonated by somebody smacking the top of the bomb with a hammer (but obviously, volunteers for that would be no problem for Iran). The dynamite explodes, driving the two masses together. Instant nuclear boom. Not elegant, but it will give effects like Hiroshima.
The prof said the only major difficulty with the design was getting the fissionable material, and handling it without killing yourself while building it. If you can figure out how to do that, the rest is easy.