http://web.archive.org/web/20240512204543/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design
(Archive link in case it’s changed.)
This article is a surprisingly entertaining read for a few reasons:
- one or more people who wrote it clearly have very strong opinions about how nuclear weapons should be built
- the article contains a surprising amount of detail, including stuff that seems like it’d be classified or at least censored
- due to both of the above, there’s a ton of
[]that I doubt will ever be resolved
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Most of the information is vague enough that you can’t do anything with it. I studied how nukes work for a high school presentation about the Demon Core a couple years ago, and it definitely seems weird to be allowed to know these things, but realistically speaking how is your average joe going to obtain the industrial capability to do anything with this knowledge, especially without killing themselves first.
I’m a lot more concerned about nuclear-capable private billionaires, when it comes to this knowledge.
That’s classist. Anyone can be nuclear capable if they put a little effort into it.
Well he had a sad ending
That’s what the USA is
As far as I understand it, nukes are pretty easy to put together with modern tech. The problem is finding enough fissile material of the right grade. That takes a massive industrial effort.
yeah this is not as surprising as it looks like
between pure fission design and thermonuke for a militarily relevant yields, say, 100-500 kt range, both designs are in principle working, but thermonuke is both compact and derives most of energy from cheap materials (natural to moderately enriched uranium and lithium deuteride). This is important if you remember that this thing has to fit in an ICBM
thermonukes have an extra advantage that they’re staged, that means dial-a-yield becomes possible - not all parts have to be used
And it is even more environmental friendly ;-)
i was also surpised tbh, its much more thorough about both materials and reasoning (although it could all be false). Also very strong opinions about who built first thermonuclear, with whole paragraph discussing it.
