Nothing protects against thermonuclear weapons: not shelter, not nuclear deterrence, not missile defenses.
|
|
An online ad suggests that the country has been working on thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are known to possess thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
"I can't imagine they're not working on true thermonuclear weapons," one expert told him.
|
|
"I can't imagine they're not working on true thermonuclear weapons," Dr. Hecker said in an interview.
|
|
Thermonuclear weapons, far more powerful than the atomic kind, are almost certainly beyond the North's know-how.
|
|
In August, he repeated his belief that humans should drop thermonuclear weapons on Mars to warm the planet.
|
|
North Korea is within months of having effective, high-yield thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles for their delivery.
|
|
Our sun will burn for 10 billion years, with the intensity of over 10 billion thermonuclear weapons going off every second.
|
|
Thermonuclear weapons typically use a fission explosion to create a fusion reaction, which is far more powerful than a fission reaction.
|
|
But I think there's something in the simple: Nomination — Victory — Trade War — Paranoid Freakout — Exchange of Thermonuclear Weapons With China variation.
|
|
An earlier version of this article misstated the length of time between the first American and Soviet tests of thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
Experts have argued for years about whether Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons or just the ability to make them should it want to.
|
|
The closest the clock has ever been to midnight—or doom—was in 1953, after the US and Soviet Union detonated thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
And he's said hitting Mars with thermonuclear weapons could warm the planet and create the equivalent of two suns over the planet's poles.
|
|
The closest the clock has ever been to midnight—or doom—was in 703, after the US and Soviet Union detonated thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
So many thermonuclear weapons were tested in the atmosphere then that the fallout contaminated every body of water on earth, and every person, too.
|
|
An online ad for what seems to be excess quantities of a bomb-boosting isotope suggests that the country has been working on thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
"Thermonuclear weapons are multistage devices, and the need to place two separate parts -- the primary and secondary -- would give a more oblong-like structure," Dewey said.
|
|
Thermonuclear weapons use a process making them much more powerful than the ones the U.S. utilized against Japan in World War II. View the discussion thread.
|
|
The top agenda item will be pressing China on economic sanctions on North Korea over its weapons program — which may have expanded to include thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The MAD (mutually assured destruction) doctrine has been established ever since the 1950s when the Soviet Union acquired nuclear and thermonuclear weapons and their intercontinental delivery vehicles.
|
|
More recently, a 2017 U.N. report alleged that North Korea had been seeking to sell Lithium-6 (Li-6), an isotope used in the production of thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China have all tested thermonuclear weapons, and H-bombs now make up the majority of the weapons in their arsenals.
|
|
To note that granting a man of that character the power to incinerate millions of people with thermonuclear weapons is a bad idea is, evidently, a poor electioneering strategy.
|
|
Since 2015, Musk has posited the idea that launching thermonuclear weapons above the ice caps at Mars' poles could warm the planet's atmosphere, with the eventual aim of making it habitable for humans.
|
|
Sometimes the black hole spends eons inhaling matter as fast as physically possible, converting that matter into energy in a long-lasting cataclysm, each instant the equivalent of billions of thermonuclear weapons detonating simultaneously.
|
|
David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said he doubted the device was real, but he said there was strong evidence that the North had been working on thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The last time humanity was this close to oblivion in the Doomsday Clock's 70-year history was in 1953 when both the US and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear weapons within nine months of each other.
|
|
The United States did not develop its first thermonuclear weapons — commonly known as hydrogen bombs — until 1952, seven years after the first and only use of nuclear weapons in wartime, the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
|
|
Although a pure fusion bomb was never created, fusion energy was integrated into hybrid fission-fusion thermonuclear weapons—colloquially known as hydrogen bombs—which were far more powerful than the fission based predecessors that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
|
|
It is part of the Long-Range Strike Bomber program (LRS-B) and projected to be a long-range, stealth strategic bomber for the United States Air Force capable of delivering conventional and thermonuclear weapons for the next few decades.
|
|
This is the closest to midnight that the clock has been since 1953, when it was moved to two minutes to midnight after United States and the Soviet Union tested their first thermonuclear weapons within 10 months of each other.
|
|
Hydrogen bombs, also known as thermonuclear weapons, work in two stages: the first detonates a fission bomb to produce energy in sufficient quantities that, when it is then focused on light nuclei, a plasma is created that enables fusion reactions to take place.
|
|
The Z machine began as a series of particle beam accelerators in the 1970s, its creation by the government motivated by fears about an energy crisis as well as a need to study fusion reactions in thermonuclear weapons in a lab setting.
|
|
Norsar said that based on the seismic readings, the event was equivalent to less than 10,000 tons of TNT, smaller than those of the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and far less than thermonuclear weapons that typically are as potent as millions of tons of TNT.
|
|
For comparison, that's the same setting as in 2125 after the United States and Soviet Union first tested thermonuclear weapons, which are about 2700,2140 times as destructive as the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan during World War II. This year, the board moved the clock another 240 seconds closer.
|
|
"I can't imagine they're not working on true thermonuclear weapons," said Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who from 1986 to 1997 directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atom bomb, and whom the North Koreans in seeking recognition as a nuclear power have repeatedly let into their atomic facilities.
|
|
Joint Task Force Seven Headquarters, Washington, D.C. p. 19. The entire operation followed Project 56 and preceded Project 57. The primary intention was to test new, second-generation thermonuclear weapons. Also tested were fission devices intended to be used as primaries for thermonuclear weapons, and small tactical weapons for air defense.
|
|
Most thermonuclear weapons are considerably smaller than this, due to practical constraints from missile warhead space and weight requirements. Edward Teller, often referred to as the "father of the hydrogen bomb" Fusion reactions do not create fission products, and thus contribute far less to the creation of nuclear fallout than fission reactions, but because all thermonuclear weapons contain at least one fission stage, and many high-yield thermonuclear devices have a final fission stage, thermonuclear weapons can generate at least as much nuclear fallout as fission-only weapons.
|
|
Lithium hydride containing lithium-6 is used in thermonuclear weapons, where it serves as fuel for the fusion stage of the bomb.
|
|
Hydrides containing deuterium are known as deuterides. Some deuterides, such as LiD, are important fusion fuels in thermonuclear weapons and useful moderators in nuclear reactors.
|
|
Hans Bethe reportedly stated independently that the first generation of thermonuclear weapons had (fusion) efficiencies varying from as low as 15% to up about 25%.
|
|
India officially maintains that it can build thermonuclear weapons of various yields up to around 200 kilotons on the basis of the Shakti-1 thermonuclear test.
|
|
In the public hearing that led to the revocation of Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance, Kenneth Pitzer testified about his policy differences with Oppenheimer concerning the development of thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
This was a pair of tests as part of the development of thermonuclear weapons. The first trial at Maralinga was held in September 1956, with the Operation Buffalo series.
|
|
The Tsar Bomba was the culmination of a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapons designed by the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1950s (e.g., the Mark 17 and B41 nuclear bombs).
|
|
Later, South Africa also developed six nuclear bombs based on the gun-type principle, and was working on missile warheads using the same basic design – See South Africa and weapons of mass destruction. There are currently no known gun-type weapons in service: advanced nuclear weapon states tended to abandon the design in favor of the implosion-type weapons, boosted fission weapons, and thermonuclear weapons. New nuclear weapon states tend to develop boosted fission and thermonuclear weapons only. All known gun-type nuclear weapons previously built worldwide have been dismantled.
|
|
It was now a race between the nations to perfect the bomb, making it lighter, reliable, and more compact. Now, 22 November 1955, marked the date were the Soviet Union possessed a weapon that could destroy any target in the United States. The thermonuclear weapons race between the United States and the Soviet Union exceeded all expectations set out before the scientists who took part. Two countries creating thermonuclear weapons with such energy yields from two different design methods proved to be the crowning achievement for science in the 1950s.
|
|
The successful testing of the RDS-37 made it possible to start large-scale development of thermonuclear weapons. The charge of the RDS-37 became the prototype for all of the following two-stage thermonuclear devices in the USSR.
|
|
Mills argued that in view of the devastation that thermonuclear weapons could cause in the UK, that this was insufficient, and that policy needed to switch to one of deterrence. Instead of targeting airfields, the RAF should target the civilian population.
|
|
In large, megaton-range hydrogen bombs, about half of the yield comes from the final fissioning of depleted uranium. Virtually all thermonuclear weapons deployed today use the "two-stage" design described above, but it is possible to add additional fusion stages—each stage igniting a larger amount of fusion fuel in the next stage. This technique can be used to construct thermonuclear weapons of arbitrarily large yield, in contrast to fission bombs, which are limited in their explosive force. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba of the USSR, which released an energy equivalent of over , was a three-stage weapon.
|
|
W80 thermonuclear warhead, photo published in Hansen's The Swords of Armageddon Chuck Hansen (May 13, 1947 - March 26, 2003) was the compiler, over a period of 30 years, of the world's largest private collection of unclassified documents on how America developed atomic and thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
As a result, the concept of "overkill"—the idea that one can simply estimate the destruction and fallout created by a thermonuclear weapon of the size postulated by Leo Szilard's "cobalt bomb" thought experiment by extrapolating from the effects of thermonuclear weapons of smaller yields—is fallacious.
|
|
If matter is sufficiently heated (hence being plasma) and confined, fusion reactions may occur due to collisions with extreme thermal kinetic energies of the particles. Thermonuclear weapons produce what amounts to an uncontrolled release of fusion energy. Controlled thermonuclear fusion concepts use magnetic fields to confine the plasma.
|
|
Construction of the first nuclear plant would not begin until 1954.Rebecca S. Lowen, "Entering the Atomic Power Race: Science, Industry, and Government." Political Science Quarterly 102.3 (1987): 459-479. in JSTOR In early 1950, Truman authorized the development of thermonuclear weapons, a more powerful version of atomic bombs.
|
|
The Robin design was used as the W45 nuclear warhead, and as the primary in the W38 and W47 thermonuclear weapons. Designations Of U.S. Nuclear Weapons, Andreas Parsch, 2005, accessed Dec 11, 2007 It has been associated with the W48 nuclear warhead, but this is probably an error.
|
|
On 12 and 19 March 1954, Penney briefed the Gen 475 Committee meetings, attended by the Chiefs of Staff, senior officials from the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office, and Sir Edwin Plowden, about recent developments in thermonuclear weapons. Sir Frederick Brundrett, the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff's Working Party on the Operational Use of Atomic Weapons (OAW), then asked Penney on 25 May for a working paper for an OAW meeting on 31 May. In turn, OAW sent a report to the Chiefs of Staff, who recommended that the United Kingdom develop its own thermonuclear weapons. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Rhoderick McGrigor, the First Sea Lord, recalled that: There was another political consideration.
|
|
Challakere is 200 km from Bangalore where an integrated township spread over has been set up by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Defence Research and Development Organization, Indian Institute of Science and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Special Mineral Enrichment Facility in Challakere focuses on enriching uranium fuel for thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
It is unknown if Israel's reported thermonuclear weapons are in the megaton range. Israel is also reported to possess a wide range of different systems, including neutron bombs, tactical nuclear weapons, and suitcase nukes.Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. New York: Random House, 1991. p.
|
|
Production of progressively heavier synthetic elements continued into 21st century as a branch of nuclear physics, but only for scientific purposes. The third important stream in nuclear physics are researches related to nuclear fusion. This is related to thermonuclear weapons (and conceived peaceful thermonuclear energy), as well as to astrophysical researches, such as stellar nucleosynthesis and Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
|
|
Beginning in March 1953, the United States deployed a number of Mark 18 bombs. A total of 90 were manufactured and placed in service. The weapon had a short lifetime, and was replaced by thermonuclear weapons in the mid-1950s. The Mark 18 weapons were all modified into lower yield Mark 6 nuclear bomb variants in 1956.
|
|
German Arsenievich Goncharov [Russian: Гончаров Герман Арсеньевич] (8 July 1928 – 7 September 2009) was a Russian nuclear physicist, engineer and mathematician. He was a key member of the theoretical team which developed and tested Soviet thermonuclear weapons from 1952 and he led a theoretical department at the Soviet nuclear research facility at Arzamas-16 from 1967 to 2004.
|
|
The 50 MWth heavy water and natural uranium research reactor at Khushab, in Punjab province, is a central element of Pakistan's program for production of plutonium, deuterium and tritium for advanced compact warheads (i.e. thermonuclear weapons). Pakistan succeeded in acquiring a tritium purification and storage plant and deuterium and tritium precursor materials from two German firms.
|
|
A pure fusion weapon is a hypothetical hydrogen bomb design that does not need a fission "primary" explosive to ignite the fusion of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen used in fission-fusion thermonuclear weapons. Such a weapon would require no fissile material and would therefore be much easier to develop in secret than existing weapons. The necessity of separating weapons-grade uranium (U-235) or breeding plutonium (Pu-239) requires a substantial and difficult-to-conceal industrial investment, and blocking the sale and transfer of the needed machinery has been the primary mechanism to control nuclear proliferation to date. Due to its not requiring a fission primary or conventional chemical explosive to detonate, the pure fusion weapon would also have greatly increased potential yield over current thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The AWG also voted with 29 votes in favour of a starting date in the mid 20th century. Ten candidate sites for a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point have been identified, one of which will be chosen to be included in the final proposal. Possible markers include microplastics, heavy metals, or the radioactive nuclei left by tests from thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
Graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in Engineering in 1945. He moved to Washington, D.C. to become a reactor engineer for the United States Atomic Energy Commission. In 1953 he was sent to Livermore, California to develop and test the first thermonuclear weapons. In 1956, he was called back to Washington to work on the NS Savannah as Project Director.
|
|
Isaak Yakovlevich Pomeranchuk ( (Polish spelling: Isaak Jakowliewicz Pomieranczuk); 20 May 1913, Warsaw, Russian Empire – 14 December 1966, Moscow, USSR) was a Soviet theoretical physicist working in particle physics (including thermonuclear weapons), quantum field theory, electromagnetic and synchrotron radiation, condensed matter physics and the physics of liquid helium. The Pomeranchuk instability, the pomeron, and a few other phenomena in particle and condensed matter physics are named after him.
|
|
1964 Operation Chrome Dome Map from Sheppard Air Force Base, TX 1966 overview of Operation Chrome Dome related or derivative flights Operation Chrome Dome was a United States Air Force Cold-War era mission from 1960 to 1968 in which B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber aircraft armed with thermonuclear weapons remained on continuous airborne alert, flying routes to points on the Soviet Union border.
|
|
Truman's decision to develop thermonuclear weapons faced opposition from many liberals and some government officials, but he believed that the Soviet Union would likely develop the weapons and was unwilling to allow the Soviets to have such an advantage. The first test of thermonuclear weaponry was conducted by the United States in 1952; the Soviet Union would perform its own thermonuclear test in August 1953.
|
|
This alkali metal is probably best-known for its wide use in lithium batteries common in all sorts of electronics devices. Other industrial applications include manufacturing heat-resistant glass and ceramics, high-performance alloys used in aircraft, and lubricating greases. Lithium deuteride is used in staged thermonuclear weapons as a fusion fuel. Compounds of lithium are also used as mood stabilizing drugs in psychiatry.
|
|
Research has been done into the possibility of pure fusion bombs: nuclear weapons that consist of fusion reactions without requiring a fission bomb to initiate them. Such a device might provide a simpler path to thermonuclear weapons than one that required development of fission weapons first, and pure fusion weapons would create significantly less nuclear fallout than other thermonuclear weapons, because they would not disperse fission products. In 1998, the United States Department of Energy divulged that the United States had, "...made a substantial investment" in the past to develop pure fusion weapons, but that, "The U.S. does not have and is not developing a pure fusion weapon", and that, "No credible design for a pure fusion weapon resulted from the DOE investment".U.S. Department of Energy, Restricted Data Declassification Decisions, 1946 to the Present (RDD-8) (January 1, 2002), accessed November 20, 2011.
|
|
Kirill Ivanovich Shchelkin () (17 May 1911 – 8 November 1968) was a Soviet Georgian physicist known for his theoretical and experimental advances in combustion and gas dynamics, for his work on the first Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and for his role as the first scientific director of the Soviet nuclear weapons development centre in the Urals at Chelyabinsk-70 and deputy scientific director of the Soviet atomic bomb project.
|
|
However, ballistic casings, fins and fusing systems would have to be attached.Hansen, p. IV-183 Operation Castle was considered by government officials to be a success as it proved the feasibility of deployable "dry" fuel designs for thermonuclear weapons. There were technical difficulties with some of the tests: one device had a yield much lower than predicted (a "fizzle"), while two other bombs detonated with over twice their predicted yields.
|
|
Thermonuclear fusion is a way to achieve nuclear fusion by using extremely high temperatures. There are two forms of thermonuclear fusion: uncontrolled, in which the resulting energy is released in an uncontrolled manner, as it is in thermonuclear weapons ("hydrogen bombs") and in most stars; and controlled, where the fusion reactions take place in an environment allowing some or all of the energy released to be harnessed for constructive purposes.
|
|
Vanunu revealed that between 1980 and 1986 Israel attained the ability to build thermonuclear weapons. By the mid 2000s estimates of Israel's arsenal ranged from 75 to 400 nuclear warheads. Several reports have surfaced claiming that Israel has some uranium enrichment capability at Dimona. Vanunu asserted that gas centrifuges were operating in Machon 8, and that a laser enrichment plant was being operated in Machon 9 (Israel holds a 1973 patent on laser isotope separation).
|
|
In comparison, man-made reactors are far less dense and much smaller, allowing the fusion products to easily escape the fuel. To offset this, much higher rates of fusion are required, and thus much higher temperatures; most man-made fusion reactors are designed to work at temperatures around 100 million degrees, or higher. , no man-made reactor has reached breakeven, let alone ignition. Ignition has however been achieved in the cores of detonating thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The start of play is set during the first week of January 1997, with the player assuming the role of the newly appointed leader of one of 140 controllable nations. Players are given complete command over their nation from the use of thermonuclear weapons, to the level of taxes, to what kind of government is in control, to sending secret service operatives to conduct covert missions. SuperPower has two different game modes; scenarios and freeplay.
|
|
As described below, a "hydrogen bomb" could mean one of several degrees of weapon, ranging from enhanced fission devices to true thermonuclear weapons. Within hours, many nations and organizations had condemned the test. Expert U.S. analysts do not believe that a hydrogen bomb was detonated. Seismic data collected so far suggests a 6–9 kiloton yield and that magnitude is not consistent with the power that would be generated by a hydrogen bomb explosion.
|
|
Lithium-6 from the Beta calutrons was used for research into thermonuclear weapons. Many other isotopes were used for peaceful scientific and medical purposes. The Beta 3 racetracks were transferred to the ORNL in March 1950. By the mid-1950s, the Beta calutrons had produced quantities of all the naturally occurring stable isotopes except those of osmium, which had to wait until April 1960. The calutrons continued to produce isotopes until 1998.
|
|
Some of his appointments were: Group Leader of Thermonuclear Weapons Physics, Group Leader of Neutron Physics, Group Leader of High-Energy-Density Physics, Deputy Division Leader of Physics, and Associate Division Leader of Theory. Shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Solem led a U.S./Russia joint collaboration of scientists in an effort to obtain good science and to improve US/Russia relations."The Dirac Series", (1996). Los Alamos Science 24: 68-71.
|
|
This group developed, tested and improved megatonne-yield thermonuclear weapons. In 1955, he transferred to the Scientific Research Institute-1011. Later, his working group developed nuclear charges for an aerial bomb, the R-13 rocket and the X-20M cruise missile. For this work in equipping bombs and missile systems, he and his colleagues received the Lenin Prize in addition to other state awards for their involvement in the development of his country's nuclear defences.
|
|
The United States Atomic Energy Commission's selection of a site near Aiken for a plant to produce fuel for thermonuclear weapons was announced on November 30, 1950. Residences and businesses at Ellenton, South Carolina, were bought for use for the plant site. Residents were moved to New Ellenton, which was constructed about eight miles north, or to neighboring towns. The site was named the Savannah River Plant, and renamed the Savannah River Site in 1989.
|
|
Tertiary stages are further fusion stages (see below), which have been put in only a handful of bombs, none of them in large-scale production. Thermonuclear weapons may or may not use a boosted primary stage, use different types of fusion fuel, and may surround the fusion fuel with beryllium (or another neutron reflecting material) instead of depleted uranium to prevent early premature fission from occurring before the secondary is optimally compressed.
|
|
Later he moved to ISRO and helped establish the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre and pioneered the first space launch-vehicle program. During the 1990s and early 2000, Kalam moved to the DRDO to lead the Indian nuclear weapons program, with particular successes in thermonuclear weapons development culminating in the operation Smiling Buddha and an ICBM Agni (missile). Kalam died on 27 July 2015, during a speech at Indian Institute of Management in Shillong, Meghalaya.
|
|
He was involved in the design of the principal physical scheme of the RDS-220 bomb, 'Tsar Bomba', the largest-ever nuclear device. For his creative efforts in the work from 1959, he received the Lenin Prize in 1962. Goncharov proposed methods of measuring the power of underground nuclear tests in 1963. In 1965, using his theoretical results, he suggested a new direction for the design of Soviet thermonuclear weapons of megatonne yields.
|
|
For example, had the effects of the sun's radiation pressure on the spacecraft of the Viking program been ignored, the spacecraft would have missed Mars' orbit by about .Eugene Hecht, "Optics", 4th edition (p. 57) Radiation pressure from starlight is crucial in a number of astrophysical processes as well. The significance of radiation pressure increases rapidly at extremely high temperatures, and can sometimes dwarf the usual gas pressure, for instance in stellar interiors and thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The Laboratory made great strides in improving the weapons, making them easier to manufacture, stockpile and handle. The Operation Sandstone tests in 1948 demonstrated that uranium-235 could be used in implosion-type nuclear weapons. Mark played a key role in the development of thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s. A crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb was approved by President Harry S. Truman in January 1950 at Edward Teller's urging before the laboratory had a workable design.
|
|
"Teller then completed and extended the invention," Bethe noted, "so, in this case, Carson was the mediator between two people who really didn't like each other." "Within an hour of Carson's ... remarks," Teller recalled, "I knew how to move ahead". The Teller-Ulam design would become that of all thermonuclear weapons. The Ivy Mike nuclear test, November 1952 When it came to testing the design in the Ivy Mike nuclear test, Mark again had a crucial go-between role.
|
|
A third test attempted to correct the Green Granite design, but was another failure. In the Grapple X test in November 1957, they successfully tested a thermonuclear design. The Grapple Y test the following April obtained most of its yield from nuclear fusion, and the Grapple Z test series later that year demonstrated a mastery of thermonuclear weapons technology. An international moratorium on nuclear tests commenced on 31 October 1958, and Britain ceased atmospheric testing for good.
|
|
British knowledge of thermonuclear weapons was based on work done at the Los Alamos Laboratory during the war. Two British scientists, Bretscher and Fuchs, had attended the conference there on the Super (as it was then called) in April 1946, and Chadwick had written a secret report on it in May 1946. The Classic Super design was unsuccessful. Fuchs and John von Neumann had produced an ingenious alternative design, for which they filed a patent in May 1946.
|
|
Rushmore Air Force Station, South Dakota, was a secure weapons administration, storage, and handling facility for atomic, and later thermonuclear weapons, located adjacent to Ellsworth Air Force Base on its north side, that was operational from 1950 to 1962. It was operated by Air Force Material Command (AFMC), Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) was under contract to provide oversight and technical responsibility of the weapons housed at the AFS.
|
|
The Mark 18 nuclear bomb was a follow-on to the Mark 6 and Mark 13, utilizing a fissile pit assembly with around 60 kilograms of HEU and delivering a yield of 500 kilotons, the largest pure-fission (non- thermonuclear) bomb design ever developed by the US. Mark 18 bombs were eventually recycled into Mark 6 Mod 6 bombs after thermonuclear weapons were deployed in quantity. The Mark 18 was tested once in Operation Ivy King.
|
|
Some have argued that the Rayleigh–Plesset equation described above is unreliable for predicting bubble temperatures and that actual temperatures in sonoluminescing systems can be far higher than 20,000 kelvins. Some research claims to have measured temperatures as high as 100,000 kelvins, and speculates temperatures could reach into the millions of kelvins. Temperatures this high could cause thermonuclear fusion. This possibility is sometimes referred to as bubble fusion and is likened to the implosion design used in the fusion component of thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
In 1966 Guest was commander of Task Force 65 of the United States Sixth Fleet when a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber collided with a tanker and crashed near Palomares, Spain. It was carrying four thermonuclear weapons, one of which fell into the Mediterranean Sea. Guest deployed and commanded an 18-vessel US Navy task force, helped by civilian-operated submersibles Aluminaut and Alvin which eventually found the bomb, which was recovered intact. Guest was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.
|
|
Released information suggests that all thermonuclear weapons built since then contain chemical compounds of deuterium and lithium in their secondary stages. The material that contains the deuterium is mostly lithium deuteride, with the lithium consisting of the isotope lithium-6. When the lithium-6 is bombarded with fast neutrons from the atomic bomb, tritium (hydrogen-3) is produced, and then the deuterium and the tritium quickly engage in thermonuclear fusion, releasing abundant energy, helium-4, and even more free neutrons.
|
|
Operation Greenhouse was the fifth American nuclear test series, the second conducted in 1951 and the first to test principles that would lead to developing thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs). Conducted at the new Pacific Proving Ground, on islands of the Enewetak Atoll, all of the devices were mounted in large steel towers, to simulate air bursts. This series of nuclear weapons tests was preceded by Operation Ranger and succeeded by Operation Buster-Jangle. Operation Greenhouse showcased new and aggressive designs for nuclear weapons.
|
|
It now began to occur to him that his hobby might not be legal. On August 27, he wrote a letter to Senator Charles H. Percy detailing how much information he had deduced from publicly available sources. This included his own design, one not as good as Morland's, which Hansen had not seen. Hansen further charged that government scientists—including Edward Teller, Ted Taylor, and George Rathjens—had leaked sensitive information about thermonuclear weapons, for which no action had been taken.
|
|
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) building in Germantown, Maryland, on 8 November 1957. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) Chairman Carl T. Durham (centre) and AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss (right) look on. The successful development of British thermonuclear weapons came at an opportune moment to renew negotiations with the Americans. The Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, on 4 October 1957, came as a tremendous shock to the American public, which had trusted that American technological superiority ensured their invulnerability.
|
|
Traditional staged thermonuclear weapons consist of two parts, a fission "primary" and a fusion/fission "secondary". The energy released by the primary when it explodes is used to (indirectly) compress the secondary and start a fusion reaction within it. Conventional explosives are far too weak to provide the level of compression needed. The primary is generally built as small as possible, due to the fact that the energy released by the secondary is much larger, and thus building a larger primary is generally inefficient.
|
|
Yaguchi's team discovers that Godzilla's plates and blood work as a cooling system and theorize that they could use a coagulating agent to freeze it. After analyzing tissue samples, they find that Godzilla is an ever-evolving creature, able to reproduce asexually. The United Nations, aware of this, informs Japan that thermonuclear weapons will be used against Godzilla should the Japanese fail to subdue it on their own in a few days. Evacuations are ordered in multiple prefectures in preparation for the nuclear attack.
|
|
Longmire performed several of the key design calculations on the very first thermonuclear weapons produced by the United States. In 1963, he was given the electromagnetic pulse data for the 1962 Operation Fishbowl high-altitude nuclear tests code-named Bluegill Triple Prime and Kingfish. The electromagnetic pulse data had puzzled other physicists. Longmire successfully deduced why the electromagnetic pulse was so much stronger than had been erroneously calculated by Nobel-laureate Hans Bethe, and Longmire was able to derive the calculations that are still used today.
|
|
Then he moved to Massachusetts and worked in the Research and Advanced Development Division of AVCO Corporation. The primary contract of this division, with the United States Air Force, was to develop vehicles for the reentry of thermonuclear weapons into the atmosphere. Panish was unwilling to do this work, but the government allotted 5% of the budget to basic research. From 1957 to 1964 he worked on the chemical thermodynamics of refractory compounds, but then decided to leave because the government terminated the funding for basic research.
|
|
In 1952, the U.S. Army patented a process for the "Preparation of Toxic Ricin", publishing a method of producing this powerful toxin. In 1958 the British government traded their VX technology with the United States in exchange for information on thermonuclear weapons. By 1961 the U.S. was producing large amounts of VX and performing its own nerve agent research. This research produced at least three more agents; the four agents (VE, VG, VM, VX) are collectively known as the "V-Series" class of nerve agents.
|
|
To relieve the monotony, some Army personnel ashore exchanged places with some Navy personnel afloat. A Christmas Island Broadcasting Service was established with nightly radio programs. The scientists at Aldermaston had not yet mastered the design of thermonuclear weapons. Knowing that much of the yield of American and Soviet bombs came from fission in the uranium-238 tamper, they had focused on what they called the "lithium-uranium cycle", whereby neutrons from the fission of uranium would trigger fusion, which would produce more neutrons to induce fission in the tamper.
|
|
Borden also pushed to have the AEC hire people who favored building the H-bomb, thereby reducing the influence within that organization of those who had opposed Truman's decision.Galison and Bernstein, In Any Light, pp. 314–315. Borden's own ultimate vision of the best weapon for his inevitable war went even further, being that of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrying thermonuclear weapons. In his JCAE role, Borden engaged during 1951–52 in considerable correspondence with officials regarding the U.S. Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program and the work General Electric was doing towards it.
|
|
The bulk of the radiation contained in the cloud consists of the nuclear fission products; neutron activation products from the weapon materials, air, and the ground debris form only a minor fraction. Neutron activation starts during the neutron burst at the instant of the blast itself, and the range of this neutron burst is limited by the absorption of the neutrons as they pass through the Earth's atmosphere. Most of the radiation is created by the fission products. Thermonuclear weapons produce a significant part of their yield from nuclear fusion.
|
|
I problemi della guerra e le vie della pace (The problems of war and the ways of peace) is a university booklet of philosopher Norberto Bobbio's lessons. The lessons are famous for the three images that illustrate the conditions of humans in the era of thermonuclear weapons. # An open bottle with a fly flying in it; # The net with a fish still alive in it; # The maze from which a person tries to escape. Some people behave like the fly because one day at random they will find the way out.
|
|
Dark Sun, pg 495. With the success of Ivy Mike as proof of the Teller-Ulam bomb concept, research began on using a "dry" fuel to make a practical fusion weapon so that the United States could begin production and deployment of thermonuclear weapons in quantity. The final result incorporated lithium deuteride as the fusion fuel in the Teller-Ulam design, vastly reducing size and weight and simplifying the overall design. Operation Castle was charted to test four dry fuel designs, two wet bombs, and one smaller device.
|
|
From July 1949 to May 1950 he attended the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Haywood was seconded to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico from February 1950 to October 1951, at a time when the first thermonuclear weapons were being developed. Edward Teller once remarked that "Colonel Haywood is the only military man I would work for." Haywood then served at the chief of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and was vice commander of the Atlantic Missile Range until his retirement from active duty in 1953.
|
|
Allen conducted experiments in several different nuclear test series. These experiments concerned the physics of thermonuclear weapons design and to the effects of high altitude nuclear explosions conceivably to be used for ballistic missile defense. From June 1957 to December 1961, Allen was assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, as the science adviser to the Physics Division of the Air Force Special Weapons Center. ("Special weapons" is a euphemism for nuclear and thermonuclear bombs.) Allen specialized in the military effects of high altitude nuclear explosions and participated in several nuclear weapons test series.
|
|
The term "radiation implosion" suggests that the secondary is crushed by radiation pressure, and calculations show that while this pressure is very large, the pressure of the materials vaporized by the radiation is much larger. The outer layers of the secondary become so hot that they vaporize and fly off the surface at high speeds. The recoil from this surface layer ejection produces pressures which are an order of magnitude stronger than the simple radiation pressure. The so- called radiation implosion in thermonuclear weapons is therefore thought to be a radiation-powered ablation-drive implosion.
|
|
SHRIMPs cylindrical end The secondary assembly was the actual SHRIMP component of the weapon. The weapon, like most contemporary thermonuclear weapons at that time, bore the same codename as the secondary component. The secondary was situated in the cylindrical end of the device, where its end was locked to the radiation case by a type of mortise and tenon joint. The hohlraum at its cylindrical end had an internal projection, which nested the secondary and had better structural strength to support the secondary's assembly, which had most of the device's mass.
|
|
From 1942, he fought on the Eastern Front (World War II) and was involved in the defence of Stalingrad. He was discharged after being wounded in February 1943. Between 1944 and 1945, he studied at the Ivanovo Institute of Chemical Technology before transferring to Moscow State University to study physics, graduating with honours in 1950. He was sent to KB-11, now the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics in the closed city of Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod region, where he worked as a senior engineer on thermonuclear weapons in Igor Tamm's group.
|
|
For these reasons, nuclear weapon design extensively utilizes D–T fusion 14.1 MeV neutrons to cause more fission. Fusion neutrons are able to cause fission in ordinarily non-fissile materials, such as depleted uranium (uranium-238), and these materials have been used in the jackets of thermonuclear weapons. Fusion neutrons also can cause fission in substances that are unsuitable or difficult to make into primary fission bombs, such as reactor grade plutonium. This physical fact thus causes ordinary non-weapons grade materials to become of concern in certain nuclear proliferation discussions and treaties.
|
|
The Whitehall Mandarin, was published in May 2014. The launch was held at Hatchards bookshop in London. The title is a reference both to bureaucrats and to China, and the question of how China was able to develop thermonuclear weapons so quickly plays a role in the novel. Paul French reviewed it favourably in The Los Angeles Review of Books, stating that: "Finally Edward Wilson is garnering the praise and readers in England he's long deserved, but it is to be hoped that America can discover him too".
|
|
The main idea was to reduce the size, weight, and most importantly, reduce the amount of fissile material necessary for nuclear weapons, while increasing the destructive power. With the Soviet Union's first nuclear test a year and half earlier, the United States had begun stockpiling the new designs before they were actually proven. Thus the success of Operation Greenhouse was vital before the development of thermonuclear weapons could continue. A number of target buildings, including bunkers, houses and factories were built on Mujinkarikku Islet to test nuclear weapon effects.
|
|
The Strath Committee was set up by the British Ministry of Defence to consider the implications of thermonuclear weapons for the United Kingdom. The Strath Report, issued in 1955, and finally declassified in 2002, estimated the type of damage and casualties Great Britain would suffer from what the Committee considered a "limited" thermonuclear attack of 10 hydrogen bombs dropped on UK cities. The result of the attack, according to the Committee's Report, would be "utter devastation". There would be up to 12 million deaths, 3 million from radiation poisoning.
|
|
Prominent theoretical physicist Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich headed one of the departments placed in charge of the theoretical aspects of the work on the creation of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons. Young A. A. Samarskii performed the first realistic calculations of macrokinetics of chain reaction of a nuclear explosion, which led to the practical importance estimated power of nuclear weapons. In relation to nuclear energy, the institute was also involved in modelling of processes of neutron transport and nuclear reactions. In particular, E. Kuznetsov is known for his work on the theory of nuclear reactors.
|
|
In October 1943, he received an invitation from Hans Bethe to join the Manhattan Project at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. There, he worked on the hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of the explosive lenses that were needed by an implosion-type weapon. He was assigned to Edward Teller's group, where he worked on Teller's "Super" bomb for Teller and Enrico Fermi. After the war he left to become an associate professor at the University of Southern California, but returned to Los Alamos in 1946 to work on thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
In November 1952, the United States conducted Ivy Mike, the first successful test of a true thermonuclear device or hydrogen bomb. Britain was therefore still several years behind in nuclear weapons technology. The Defence Policy Committee, chaired by Churchill and consisting of the senior Cabinet members, considered the political and strategic implications in June 1954, and concluded that "we must maintain and strengthen our position as a world power so that Her Majesty's Government can exercise a powerful influence in the counsels of the world." In July 1954, Cabinet agreed to proceed with the development of thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
Apart from Soviet warheads designated to deploy within Polish military in case of war with NATO, it is believed that Polish authorities attempted to develop thermonuclear weapons on its own. In 1970s a group of scientists headed by Sylwester Kaliski worked on initiating nuclear fusion using high-energy lasers. The project received considerable funds as well as personal support of first secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party Edward Gierek, acknowledged with the potential military purpose of such idea. The research was dropped after Kaliski was killed in car accident in 1978, which circumstances remain unclear.
|
|
Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909–1984) was an American mathematician of Polish Jewish origin, who participated in the Manhattan Project and originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. He also invented nuclear pulse propulsion and developed a number of mathematical tools in number theory, set theory, ergodic theory and algebraic topology. Ulam was born in Lwów Galicia to a wealthy Polish-Jewish banking and timber- processing familyAnxiously from Lwów: Family Letters to Stanislaw M. Ulam A website dedicated to the Ulam family, part of which perished in The Holocaust. who were part of the large Jewish minority population of the city.
|
|
The first nuclear weapons to be delivered to Scampton arrived during 1958 and comprised twenty kiloton (20kt) atomic bombs given the Rainbow Code, Blue Danube. They were replaced by the smaller Yellow Sun Stage 1 (Mk. 1s) which were the first of the UK's operational thermonuclear weapons. The development of the stand-off nuclear missile Blue Steel required the construction of new specialist buildings: the Missile Servicing and Storage Building (MSSB) which was erected between the main hangars and the airfield, and the highly volatile High Test Peroxide (HTP) and kerosene fuel storage buildings which were located at some distance from the MSSB.
|
|
Modern tactical nuclear warheads have yields up to the tens of kilotons or potentially hundreds several times that of those used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Strategic thinking under the Eisenhower administration and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was that of massive retaliation in the face of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, many of the most destructive deployed thermonuclear weapons were developed by both superpowers. Every bit of destructive power that could be delivered to the enemy's interior was considered advantageous in maintaining deterrence and would become the basis of the US strategic arsenal.
|
|
Gold has been proposed as a material for creating a salted nuclear weapon (cobalt is another, better-known salting material). A jacket of natural 197Au, irradiated by the intense high-energy neutron flux from an exploding thermonuclear weapon, would transmute into the radioactive isotope 198Au with a half-life of 2.697 days and produce approximately 0.411 MeV of gamma radiation, significantly increasing the radioactivity of the weapon's fallout for several days. Such a weapon is not known to have ever been built, tested, or used. Gold has been used in thermonuclear weapons as radiation mirrors within the secondary assembly.
|
|
Contemporary news reports stated that the site would not be used to produce nuclear bombs, but might be used to produce uranium and plutonium components for use in nuclear weapons. In 1953, the plant began production of bomb components, manufacturing plutonium pits which were used at the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas to assemble fission weapons and the primary stages of thermonuclear weapons. By 1957, the plant had expanded to 27 buildings. On September 11, 1957, a plutonium fire occurred in one of the gloveboxes used to handle radioactive materials, igniting the combustible rubber gloves and plexiglas windows of the box.
|
|
The toxicity of these substances had not passed unnoticed by the British Government, as some of the compounds had already been sent to their research facility at Porton Down for evaluation. Some of the chemicals from this class of compounds formed a new group of nerve agents called V Agents. The British Government unilaterally renounced chemical and biological weapons in 1956, although in 1958 traded their research on VG technology with the United States Government in exchange for information on thermonuclear weapons. The US then went into production of large amounts of the chemically similar, but much more toxic VX in 1961.
|
|
These fields are strong enough to withstand the simultaneous detonation of multiple thermonuclear weapons, hence Magneto is invulnerable to most harm when surrounded by his shield and can survive in deep space thanks to it. He can also channel his powers through his own body to increase his strength and durability far beyond human limits and has a baseline reaction time 15 times faster than those of regular humans. On occasion he has altered the behavior of gravitational fields around him, which has been suggested as evidence of the existence of a unified field which he can manipulate.
|
|
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Russian nuclear physicist, dissident, Nobel laureate, and activist for disarmament, peace and human rights. He became renowned as the designer of the Soviet Union's RDS-37, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov later became an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union, for which he faced state persecution; these efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Sakharov Prize, which is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, is named in his honor.
|
|
The first Soviet fusion design, developed by Andrei Sakharov and Vitaly Ginzburg in 1949 (before the Soviets had a working fission bomb), was dubbed the Sloika, after a Russian layer cake, and was not of the Teller–Ulam configuration. It used alternating layers of fissile material and lithium deuteride fusion fuel spiked with tritium (this was later dubbed Sakharov's "First Idea"). Though nuclear fusion might have been technically achievable, it did not have the scaling property of a "staged" weapon. Thus, such a design could not produce thermonuclear weapons whose explosive yields could be made arbitrarily large (unlike U.S. designs at that time).
|
|
This saw the first American tests of boosted fission weapons, an important step towards thermonuclear weapons. He studied the effects of nuclear blasts, and co- authored a paper with John von Neumann on Mach stem formation, an important aspect of an air blast wave. In spite or perhaps because of his role in these nuclear tests, Reines was concerned about the dangers of radioactive pollution from atmospheric nuclear tests, and became an advocate of underground nuclear testing. In the wake of the Sputnik crisis, he participated in John Archibald Wheeler's Project 137, which evolved into JASON.
|
|
239Pu is a fissile material suitable for use in nuclear weapons. As a result, if the fuel of a heavy-water reactor is changed frequently, significant amounts of weapons-grade plutonium can be chemically extracted from the irradiated natural uranium fuel by nuclear reprocessing. In addition, the use of heavy water as a moderator results in the production of small amounts of tritium when the deuterium nuclei in the heavy water absorb neutrons, a very inefficient reaction. Tritium is essential for the production of boosted fission weapons, which in turn enable the easier production of thermonuclear weapons, including neutron bombs.
|
|
The only practical way to store hydrogen was in liquid form, and this required a temperature below . The third was that the hydrogen would be heated to a temperature of around , and materials would be required that could withstand such temperatures and resist corrosion by hydrogen. Cutaway diagram of Kiwi rocket engine Liquid hydrogen was theoretically the best possible propellant, but in the early 1950s it was expensive, and available only in small quantities. In 1952, the AEC and the National Bureau of Standards had opened a plant near Boulder, Colorado, to produce liquid hydrogen for the thermonuclear weapons program.
|
|
Fusion reactions involving lithium are well studied due to the use of lithium for breeding tritium in thermonuclear weapons. They are intermediate in ignition difficulty between the reactions involving lower atomic-number species, H and He, and the 11B reaction. The p–7Li reaction, although highly energetic, releases neutrons because of the high cross section for the alternate neutron-producing reaction 1p + 7Li → 7Be + n S. G. Mashnik, M. B. Chadwick, H. G. Hughes, R. C. Little, R. E. MacFarlane, L. S. Waters, and P. G. Young, "7Li(p,n) NUCLEAR DATA LIBRARY FOR INCIDENT PROTON ENERGIES TO 150 MEV", Feb. 8, 2008.
|
|
Two Okinawan workers were also injured in the blasts. Had the aircraft become airborne, it might have crashed about north of the runway and directly into the Chibana ammunition storage depot. The Chibana depot stored ammunition, bombs, high explosives, and tens of thousands artillery shells and is now known to have held warheads for 19 different atomic and thermonuclear weapons systems in the hardened weapon storage areas. The weapons included W28 warheads used in the MGM-13 Mace cruise missile and W31 warheads used in MGR-1 Honest John and MIM-14 Nike-Hercules (Nike-H) missiles.
|
|
However, in February 1951, Ulam had a new idea, in which the shock wave from an atomic bomb "primary" stage, through an arrangement he called "hydrodynamic lensing", would compress a "secondary" stage of deuterium fusion fuel wrapped around a plutonium rod or "spark plug". On being informed, Teller immediately grasped the potential for using the X-rays produced by the primary explosion for hydrodynamic lensing. This arrangement, which made thermonuclear weapons possible, is now known as the Teller–Ulam design. Although it was not what Truman had approved, the design did work, and was capable of producing multi- megaton explosions.
|
|
In August 1994, the Colombian national Justiniano Torres Benítez and his accomplices, the two Spaniards Julio Oroz Eguia and Javier Bengoechea Arratibel were arrested by Bavarian police at Munich airport and a Munich hotel room. Torres Benítez, who arrived from Moscow on board of a Boeing 737 on 10 August 1994, had 363.4 grams of plutonium-239 in his luggage. The plutonium, however, was only 87% pure, and was thus not deemed weapons-grade. Further, more than 400 grams of Lithium-6, which is needed for the construction of thermonuclear weapons, were found on Torres Benítez.
|
|
Most often, indirect drive hohlraum targets are used to simulate thermonuclear weapons tests due to the fact that the fusion fuel in them is also imploded mainly by X-ray radiation. A variety of ICF drivers are being explored. Lasers have improved dramatically since the 1970s, scaling up in energy and power from a few joules and kilowatts to megajoules (see NIF laser) and hundreds of terawatts, using mostly frequency doubled or tripled light from neodymium glass amplifiers. Heavy ion beams are particularly interesting for commercial generation, as they are easy to create, control, and focus.
|
|
Stanisław Marcin Ulam (; 3 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish-American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved some theorems and proposed several conjectures. Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family, Ulam studied mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD in 1933 under the supervision of Kazimierz Kuratowski.
|
|
After the Teller-Ulam radiation implosion breakthrough of 1951, the technical implications and possibilities were fully explored, but ideas not directly relevant to making the largest possible bombs for long-range Air Force bombers were shelved. Because of Oppenheimer's initial position in the H-bomb debate, in opposition to large thermonuclear weapons, and the assumption that he still had influence over Los Alamos despite his departure, political allies of Edward Teller decided he needed his own laboratory in order to pursue H-bombs. By the time it was opened in 1952, in Livermore, California, Los Alamos had finished the job Livermore was designed to do.
|
|
On August 8, 2017, the Washington Post reported recent analysis completed the previous month by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency which concluded that North Korea had successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit in missiles and could have up to 60 nuclear warheads in its inventory. By 2019 the DIA estimated that North Korea had accrued a stockpile of 65 weapons' worth of fissile material and that the country was producing as much as twelve weapons' worth of fissile material annually. U.S. intelligence also assessed that North Korea had built around 30 fissile material cores for use in nuclear weapons, including four- to-six two-stage thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
That meant that if he had reason to believe that a war had already begun when his communications with Osan and Japan were broken, he was required to launch his dozen F-100s with their thermonuclear weapons. They never practiced that launch, because the risk of an accident was too great. Ellsberg then asked what might happen if he gave such launch orders and the sixth plane succumbed to a thermonuclear accident on the runway. After some thought, the major agreed that the five planes already in the air would likely conclude that a nuclear war had begun, and they would likely deliver their warheads to their preassigned targets.
|
|
In an implosion-type nuclear weapon design, a sphere of plutonium, uranium, or other fissile material is imploded by a spherical arrangement of explosive charges. This decreases the material's volume and thus increases its density by a factor of two to three, causing it to reach critical mass and create a nuclear explosion. In some forms of thermonuclear weapons, the energy from this explosion is then used to implode a capsule of fusion fuel before igniting it, causing a fusion reaction (see Teller–Ulam design). In general, the use of radiation to implode something, as in a hydrogen bomb or in laser driven inertial confinement fusion, is known as radiation implosion.
|
|
Because tritium is used in boosted fission weapons and thermonuclear weapons (though in quantities several thousand times larger than that in a keychain), consumer and safety devices containing tritium for use in the United States are subject to certain possession, resale, disposal, and use restrictions. In the US, devices such as self-luminous exit signs, gauges, wristwatches, etc. that contain small amounts of tritium are under the jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and are subject to possession, distribution, and import and export regulations found in 10 CFR Parts, 30, 32, and 110. They are also subject to regulations for possession, use, and disposal in certain states.
|
|
Y-12 Plant, in Oak Ridge TN. In the US, several chemical exchange methods for lithium isotope separation have been under investigation in the 1930s and 1940s to develop a process for lithium-6 production, so that tritium could be obtained for thermonuclear weapons research. The system finally selected was the COLEX process, with aqueous lithium hydroxide (LiOH) contacted with lithium-mercury amalgam. This process was initially used in the US between 1955 and 1963 in the Y12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The COLEX plants in Oak Ridge had a very rough start in 1955 with major problems in this entirely new, complicated, and potentially hazardous technology.
|
|
Britain was therefore still several years behind in nuclear weapons technology. The Defence Policy Committee, chaired by Churchill and consisting of the senior Cabinet members, considered the political and strategic implications in June 1954, and concluded that "we must maintain and strengthen our position as a world power so that Her Majesty's Government can exercise a powerful influence in the counsels of the world." In July 1954, Cabinet agreed to proceed with the development of thermonuclear weapons. The scientists at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority's Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire included William Penney, William Cook, Ken Allen, Samuel Curran, Henry Hulme, Bryan Taylor and John Ward.
|
|
Hydrogen bombs produce tritium in situ and thus burn deuterium and lithium. Under conditions of sufficient temperature and pressure the reactions form a loop chain reaction known as Jetter's Cycle. The scientists at Aldermaston had created a design incorporating staging, radiation implosion, and compression, but they had not mastered the design of thermonuclear weapons. Knowing that much of the yield of American and Soviet bombs came from fission in the uranium-238 tamper, they had focused on what they called the "lithium-uranium cycle", whereby neutrons from the fission of uranium would trigger fusion, which would produce more neutrons to induce fission in the tamper.
|
|
Information about the W88 has implied that it is a variation of the standard Teller–Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons. In a thermonuclear weapon such as the W88, nuclear fission in the primary part causes nuclear fusion in the secondary part, which results in the main explosion. Although the weapon employs fusion in the secondary, most of the explosive yield comes from fission of nuclear material in the primary, secondary, and casing. In 1999, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the W88 had an egg-shaped primary and a spherical secondary, which were together inside a radiation case known as the "peanut" for its shape.
|
|
The calculations for a nonspherical primary are apparently orders of magnitude more difficult than for a spherical primary. A spherically symmetric simulation is one-dimensional, while an axially symmetric simulation is two dimensional. Simulations typically divide up each dimension into discrete segments, so a one-dimensional simulation might involve only 100 points, while a similarly accurate two dimensional simulation would require 10,000. This would likely be the reason they would be desirable for a country like the People's Republic of China, which already developed its own nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, especially since they were no longer conducting nuclear testing which would provide valuable design information.
|
|
The Pokhran-II tests were a series of five nuclear bomb test explosions conducted by India at the Indian Army's Pokhran Test Range in May 1998. It was the second instance of nuclear testing conducted by India; the first test, code-named Smiling Buddha, was conducted in May 1974. The tests achieved their main objective of giving India the capability to build fission and thermonuclear weapons with yields up to 200 Kilotons. The then Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission described each one of the explosions of Pokhran-II to be "equivalent to several tests carried out by other nuclear weapon states over decades".
|
|
The development of Soviet atomic bombs provided the impetus for the development of even more destructive thermonuclear weapons. On 31 December 1949, the Strategic Air Command had 521 B-29s, B-36s and B-50s capable of delivering atomic bombs. It was estimated that SAC bombers would suffer 35 percent casualties at night, and fifty percent if missions had to be conducted in daylight. The delivery of the 292 atomic bombs called for by the Offtackle plan was regarded as practical, but there would be no ability to launch follow-up raids. A jet bomber, the Boeing B-47 Stratojet was under development, but would not become operational until 1953.
|
|
The basics of the Teller–Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb: a fission bomb uses radiation to compress and heat a separate section of fusion fuel. The other basic type of nuclear weapon produces a large proportion of its energy in nuclear fusion reactions. Such fusion weapons are generally referred to as thermonuclear weapons or more colloquially as hydrogen bombs (abbreviated as H-bombs), as they rely on fusion reactions between isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium). All such weapons derive a significant portion of their energy from fission reactions used to "trigger" fusion reactions, and fusion reactions can themselves trigger additional fission reactions.
|
|
The yield-to-weight ratio is the amount of weapon yield compared to the mass of the weapon. The practical maximum yield-to- weight ratio for fusion weapons (thermonuclear weapons) has been estimated to six megatons of TNT per metric ton of bomb mass (25 TJ/kg). Yields of 5.2 megatons/ton and higher have been reported for large weapons constructed for single-warhead use in the early 1960s.The B-41 Bomb Since then, the smaller warheads needed to achieve the increased net damage efficiency (bomb damage/bomb mass) of multiple warhead systems have resulted in decreases in the yield/mass ratio for single modern warheads.
|
|
The town is noted for a fatal accident in 1966 in which a B-52 Stratofortress of the Strategic Air Command crashed after a midair collision with a KC-135 Stratotanker plane, causing radioactive contamination after its payload of four hydrogen bombs (H-bombs) was dispersed and crashed. There were four thermonuclear weapons in the bomber. The high- explosive igniters in two of these bombs detonated on impact, spreading radioactive material, including deadly plutonium-239, over a wide area of the Spanish countryside, but safety mechanisms and electronics prevented nuclear explosions. The third H-bomb landed via parachute into a stream, where it was relatively intact and was recovered.
|
|
The Angara V facility of the Kurchatov Institute had been built for the same reason: to help simulate and design the second stage of hydrogen bombs and test the effect of high power x-rays on nuclear missiles' warheads. The space inside the wire array was filled with polystyrene, which helps homogenize the X-ray flux. Any country developing thermonuclear weapons has its own Z machine, but those not using water lines had long rising pulses (for example 800ns in the Sphinx, the French machine at Gramat). In the UK, the Magpie machine was situated at the Imperial College under control of Malcolm Haines.
|
|
The Robin was the common design nuclear fission bomb core for several Cold War designs for American nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, according to researcher Chuck Hansen. Beware the old story by Chuck Hansen, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2001 pp. 52-55 (vol. 57, no. 02) United States Nuclear Tests July 1945 to 31 December 1992 , NRDC NWD 94-1, Robert Standish Norris and Thomas B. Cochran, accessed Dec 11, 2007 Primary is the technical term for the fission bomb component of a thermonuclear or fusion bomb, which is used to start the reactions going and implode and detonate the second, fusion stage.
|
|
He then returned to the War Department General Staff, where he served in the Operations and Plans Division. In 1947 McCormack was chosen as the Director of Military Applications of the United States Atomic Energy Commission with the rank of brigadier general. He took a pragmatic approach to handling the issue of the proper agency to hold custody of the nuclear weapons stockpile, and encouraged and supported Edward Teller's development of thermonuclear weapons. He transferred to the United States Air Force on 25 July 1950, and was appointed Director of Nuclear Applications at the Air Research and Development Center in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1952.
|
|
However, he was also aware of the sensitivity of the issue of custody, which Congress had assigned to the AEC. Rather than continue to press for changes in the law, he accepted the situation as it was, and strove to make the best of it, working within the existing framework. McCormack became involved in discussions with Edward Teller over the possibility of developing thermonuclear weapons, then known as the "Super". McCormack became an early advocate of the Super, which promised yields in the megaton range, and directed Norris Bradbury at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to proceed with its development even at the detriment of other weapons.
|
|
The State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, sometimes referred to as the Oppenheimer Panel, was a group created by the United States Department of State that existed from April 1952 to January 1953, during the last year of the Truman administration. It was composed of prominent figures from science, law, education, and the government, and chaired by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Its purpose was to make recommendations regarding U.S. disarmament policy in the context of the Cold War. The panel's initial recommendation represented a last attempt to forestall the advent of thermonuclear weapons by urging the U.S. government to not undertake a first test of the hydrogen bomb.
|
|
The United Kingdom and Canada participated in the initial American development of the atomic bomb (Manhattan Project) during World War II, but were afterwards excluded from nuclear weapons secrets by act of the US Congress. Britain launched an independent nuclear weapons program; after Britain successfully developed thermonuclear weapons, the US and UK signed the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement sharing American weapons designs, eliminating the need for independent development. France developed a nuclear force de frappe and left the NATO command structure while continuing to be allied with the other Western countries. NATO nuclear Sharing was conceived to prevent further independent proliferation among the western allies.
|
|
With the aid of a cadre of female "computers", including his wife Françoise Aron Ulam, he found that Teller's "Super" design was unworkable. In January 1951, Ulam and Teller came up with the Teller–Ulam design, which is the basis for all thermonuclear weapons. Ulam considered the problem of nuclear propulsion of rockets, which was pursued by Project Rover, and proposed, as an alternative to Rover's nuclear thermal rocket, to harness small nuclear explosions for propulsion, which became Project Orion. With Fermi, John Pasta, and Mary Tsingou, Ulam studied the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem, which became the inspiration for the field of non-linear science.
|
|
As an example of the third concern, Ellsberg discussed an interview he had in 1958 with a major, who commanded a squadron of 12 F-100 fighter-bombers at Kunsan Air Base, South Korea. His aircraft were equipped with Mark 28 thermonuclear weapons with a yield of 1.1 megatons each, roughly half the explosive power of all the bombs dropped by the US in World War II both in Europe and the Pacific. The major said his official orders were to wait for orders from his superiors in Osan Air Base, South Korea, or in Japan before ordering his F-100s into the air. However, the major also said that standard military doctrine required him to protect his forces.
|
|
Article 2 of the treaty covered joint development of defence plans; the mutual training of personnel in the use and defence against nuclear weapons; the sharing of intelligence and evaluation of enemy capabilities; the development of nuclear delivery systems and the research, development and design of military reactors. The treaty called for the exchange of "classified information concerning atomic weapons when, after consultation with the other Party, the communicating Party determines that the communication of such information is necessary to improve the recipient's atomic weapon design, development and fabrication capability". The US would communicate information about atomic weapons that were similar to UK atomic weapons. For the immediate future, that would exclude information about thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
At the same time, the rocket effect on the surface of the hohlraum would force the radiation case to speed outwards. The ballistic case would confine the exploding radiation case for as long as necessary. The fact that the tamper material was uranium enriched in U is primarily based on the final fission reaction fragments detected in the radiochemical analysis, which conclusively showed the presence of U, found by the Japanese in the shot debris. The first-generation thermonuclear weapons (MK-14, 16, 17, 21, 22 and 24) all used uranium tampers enriched to 37.5% U. The exception to this was the MK-15 ZOMBIE that used a 93.5% enriched fission jacket.
|
|
The Mark 27 nuclear bomb and closely related W27 warhead were two American thermonuclear bomb designs from the late 1950s. The Mark 27 was designed by the University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL; now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) starting in the mid-1950s. The basic design concept competed with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL; now Los Alamos National Laboratory) design that would become the Mark 28 / B-28 nuclear bomb and W28 warhead. The Mark 27 was roughly twice as heavy as the Mark 28/B-28/W28 family of thermonuclear weapons. The Mark 27/W27 devices had a yield of 2 megatons versus the 1 to 1.5 megatons of the Mark 28/B-28/W28 weapons.
|
|
Reed began active duty with the Air Force in November 1956, and served until 1959 as technical project officer for the Minuteman Re-Entry Vehicle System with the Air Force's Ballistic Missile Division. While on this assignment, he attended the University of Southern California during off-duty hours and earned a master of science degree in electrical engineering. In 1959, he was assigned to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, engaged in thermonuclear weapons physics. He was released from active duty with the Air Force in May 1961, but he rejoined the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory as a civilian for the 1962 test series, continuing there as a consultant until 1967.
|
|
Since the 1950s much of China's research and development effort has been channeled into military work. Military research facilities and factories are reported to have China's best- trained personnel, highest level of technology, and first priority for funding. Although the military sector has been shrouded in secrecy, its work evidently has resulted in the largely independent development of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and the successful launch and recovery of communications and reconnaissance satellites. Little information on the military research sector has been made public, and secrecy has been reinforced by isolation of many military research centers in the remote deserts and mountains of China's western regions.
|
|
In 1954, just weeks after the Castle Bravo test, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru made the first call for a "standstill agreement" on nuclear testing, who saw a testing moratorium as a stepping stone to more comprehensive arms control agreements. In the same year, the British Labour Party, then led by Clement Attlee, called on the UN to ban testing of thermonuclear weapons. 1955 marks the beginning of test-ban negotiations, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev first proposed talks on the subject in February 1955. On 10 May 1955, the Soviet Union proposed a test ban before the UN Disarmament Commission's "Committee of Five" (Britain, Canada, France, the Soviet Union, and the US).
|
|
The debate over the merits of the Super pitted the United States Air Force against the other services, which wanted more small, tactical weapons. Concurrently, there was a technical debate between Teller and other scientists like Robert Oppenheimer over the feasibility of the Super, because there was no guarantee that it would work, and even after Operation Greenhouse, the processes involved in thermonuclear reactions were not fully understood. It ultimately became apparent that the Super design would not work, but the development of the Teller-Ulam design provided a new path to high yield thermonuclear weapons. For his services as Director of Military Applications, McCormack was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal.
|
|
Partition of India in 1947, subsequent violence and territorial disputes left relations between India and Pakistan sour and very hostile and various confrontations and wars which largely shaped the politics of the region and led to the creation of Bangladesh. With Yugoslavia, India found Non-Aligned Movement but later entered an agreement with former Soviet Union following western support for Pakistan. Amid the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, US sent its USS Enterprise to the Indian Ocean what was perceived as a nuclear threat by India. India's nuclear test in 1974 pushed Pakistan's nuclear program who conducted nuclear tests in Chagai-I in 1998, just 18 days after India's series of nuclear tests for thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The first extensive details of the weapons program came in the London Sunday Times on October 5, 1986, which published information provided by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician formerly employed at the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona. For publication of state secrets Vanunu was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome, brought back to Israel, and sentenced to 18 years in prison for treason and espionage. Although there had been much speculation prior to Vanunu's revelations that the Dimona site was creating nuclear weapons, Vanunu's information indicated that Israel had also built thermonuclear weapons. Theodore Taylor, a former U.S. weapon designer leading the field in small, efficient nuclear weapons, reviewed the 1986 leaks and photographs of the Israeli nuclear program by Mordechai Vanunu in detail.
|
|
This method proved impractical at the time, but the development of lasers would later open the possibility of separation of isotopes by laser excitation. Through her friend Edward Teller, Goeppert Mayer was given a position at Columbia with the Opacity Project, which researched the properties of matter and radiation at extremely high temperatures with an eye to the development of the Teller's "Super" bomb, the wartime program for the development of thermonuclear weapons. In February 1945, Joe was sent to the Pacific War, and Goeppert Mayer decided to leave her children in New York and join Teller's group at the Los Alamos Laboratory. Joe came back from the Pacific earlier than expected, and they returned to New York together in July 1945.
|
|
In September 1945, Jeppson was awarded the Silver Star in recognition of his service to his country. During the 1950s he worked as a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California developing hydrogen thermonuclear weapons. Later in his career, he helped develop several key technological breakthroughs including microwave technology as well as stabilizers used on helicopters. After retiring from his work as a physicist, Jeppson lived in Las Vegas with his second wife Mollie. Left to right: Morris Jeppson, Colonel Paul Tibbets, Theodore Van Kirk at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center on October 23, 2004 For many years, Jeppson refused to speak publicly about the Hiroshima mission for fear of reprisal against himself and his family.
|
|
Much of the impetus for the PTBT, the precursor to the CTBT, was rising public concern surrounding the size and resulting nuclear fallout from underwater and atmospheric nuclear tests, particularly tests of powerful thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs). The Castle Bravo test of 1 March 1954, in particular, attracted significant attention as the detonation resulted in fallout that spread over inhabited areas and sickened a group of Japanese fishermen. Between 1945 and 1963, the US conducted 215 atmospheric tests, the Soviet Union conducted 219, the UK conducted 21, and France conducted three. In 1954, following the Castle Bravo test, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India issued the first appeal for a "standstill agreement" on testing, which was soon echoed by the British Labour Party.
|
|
Morland's work is interpreted as being at least partially correct because the DOE had sought to censor it, one of the few times they violated their usual approach of not acknowledging "secret" material that had been released; however, to what degree it lacks information, or has incorrect information, is not known with any confidence. The difficulty that a number of nations had in developing the Teller–Ulam design (even when they apparently understood the design, such as with the United Kingdom), makes it somewhat unlikely that this simple information alone is what provides the ability to manufacture thermonuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the ideas put forward by Morland in 1979 have been the basis for all the current speculation on the Teller–Ulam design.
|
|
All current thermonuclear weapons use a fission bomb as a first stage to create the high temperatures and pressures necessary to start a fusion reaction between deuterium and tritium in a second stage. For many years, nuclear weapon designers have researched whether it is possible to create high enough temperatures and pressures inside a confined space to ignite a fusion reaction, without using fission. Pure fusion weapons offer the possibility of generating arbitrarily small nuclear yields because no critical mass of fissile fuel need be assembled for detonation, as with a conventional fission primary needed to spark a fusion explosion. There is also the advantage of reduced collateral damage stemming from fallout because these weapons would not create the highly radioactive byproducts associated with fission-type weapons.
|
|
She screened the carrier task force off Korea, patrolled and bombarded the coast, and joined in hunter-killer exercises off Okinawa before returning to Pearl Harbor on 14 November. Her second Korean tour, from 10 November 1952 to 29 May 1953, found her performing similar duty, as well as patrolling the Taiwan Straits, and entering the dangerous waters of Wonsan Harbor to bombard enemy shore batteries. During the first 4½ months of 1954, Epperson patrolled in the Marshall Islands during thermonuclear weapons tests, and in June sailed for duty in the Far East once more, an annual part of her employment schedule through 1962. In 1958 and 1959, her western Pacific cruises included visits to Manus, ports in Australia and New Zealand, and Pago Pago, American Samoa.
|
|
Of course, the successful and promising work from both the United States and the Soviet Union only spurred each country to push for stronger weapons, as the floodgates of thermonuclear weapon potential had been opened. This was, of course, entirely the norm at the time considering that the Cold War was in full swing. It was a significant boost to Soviet morale knowing that the Soviet Union's physicists, engineers, scientist, and great minds were able to not only compete with the Americans, but also able to outperform them in some key areas of weapon and technological development. The RDS program gave rise to the genius of Andrei Sakharov, who undoubtedly was the driving force behind the Soviet thermonuclear weapons development program.
|
|
Operation Grapple was a set of four British nuclear weapons test series of early atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs carried out in 1957 and 1958 at Malden Island and Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the Pacific Ocean (modern Kiribati) as part of the British hydrogen bomb programme. Nine nuclear explosions were initiated, culminating in the United Kingdom becoming the third recognised possessor of thermonuclear weapons and the restoration of the nuclear Special Relationship with the United States with the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. During the Second World War, Britain had a nuclear weapons project, codenamed Tube Alloys, which was merged with the American Manhattan Project in August 1943. Many of Britain's top scientists participated in the British contribution to the Manhattan Project.
|
|
Initially, the Model 96 store was to weigh between four and five tons and carry a W-5 fission warhead with a yield of about 80 kilotons. Ballistic testing of the pod began with the first drop of a Model 96 "shape" from a B-47 on March 6, 1954. However, the rapid development of compact thermonuclear weapons led to the W-5 being superseded by the W-15 warhead, based on a Los Alamos device nicknamed Zombie. Although somewhat larger and heavier than the W-5, the W-15 boasted a much greater yield of between 1 and 3 megatons. The resulting pod was 32 feet long, 42 inches in diameter, and had capacity for 703 gallons of fuel in addition to the 6,000-pound class W-15 warhead.
|
|
Lithium deuteride, in the form of lithium-7 deuteride, is a good moderator for nuclear reactors, because deuterium (2H) has a lower neutron absorption cross-section than ordinary hydrogen (1H) does, and the cross- section for 7Li is also low, decreasing the absorption of neutrons in a reactor. 7Li is preferred for a moderator because it has a lower neutron capture cross-section, and it also forms less tritium (3H) under bombardment with neutrons. The corresponding lithium-6 deuteride, 6Li2H, or 6LiD, is the primary fusion fuel in thermonuclear weapons. In hydrogen warheads of the Teller–Ulam design, a nuclear fission trigger explodes to heat and compress the lithium-6 deuteride, and to bombard the 6LiD with neutrons to produce 3H (tritium) in an exothermic reaction: 6Li2H + n → 4He + 3H.
|
|
Noyes’ career included several academic and research positions. He first worked as a post-doctoral fellow and then as assistant professor of Physics at the University of Rochester (1952–5). During that time, he compiled and edited the Proceedings of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Rochester Conferences on High Energy Physics. During the summers of those years, he worked at Project Matterhorn at Princeton, researching thermonuclear weapons (1952) and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (1953). During the summer of 1954, he worked on calculating the binding energy of the triton using a particular non- relativistic, quantum mechanical potential model fitted to the low energy nucleon-nucleon parameters at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. In 1955, Noyes joined the Theoretical Division of what was to become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
|
|
Bombarding 238U with fast neutrons induces fissions, releasing energy as long as the external neutron source is present. This is an important effect in all reactors where fast neutrons from the fissile isotope can cause the fission of nearby 238U nuclei, which means that some small part of the 238U is "burned-up" in all nuclear fuels, especially in fast breeder reactors that operate with higher-energy neutrons. That same fast-fission effect is used to augment the energy released by modern thermonuclear weapons, by jacketing the weapon with 238U to react with neutrons released by nuclear fusion at the center of the device. But the explosive effects of nuclear fission chain reactions can be reduced by using substances like moderators which slow down the speed of secondary neutrons.
|
|
The Teller–Ulam design was for many years considered one of the top nuclear secrets, and even today it is not discussed in any detail by official publications with origins "behind the fence" of classification. United States Department of Energy (DOE) policy has been, and continues to be, that they do not acknowledge when "leaks" occur, because doing so would acknowledge the accuracy of the supposed leaked information. Aside from images of the warhead casing, most information in the public domain about this design is relegated to a few terse statements by the DOE and the work of a few individual investigators. Photographs of warhead casings, such as this one of the W80 nuclear warhead, allow for some speculation as to the relative size and shapes of the primaries and secondaries in U.S. thermonuclear weapons.
|
|
The Treasury immediately inquired as to whether this meant that the British megaton bomb programme could be terminated. Project E was intended to be a stopgap measure, and while the RAF was impressed with the superior yield of US thermonuclear weapons, its Director of Plans noted that "by retaining Project E at its present strength the US may continue to underestimate the UK independent capability, so that the weight given to HM Government's influence on vital issues would be less than it might otherwise be." Both Sandys and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Dermot Boyle argued that the UK needed the capacity to initiate a nuclear war unilaterally, but this was not possible if US permission was required for half of the force.
|
|
Another friend, Gian-Carlo Rota, asserted in a 1987 article that the attack changed Ulam's personality: afterwards, he turned from rigorous pure mathematics to more speculative conjectures concerning the application of mathematics to physics and biology; Rota also cites Ulam's former collaborator Paul Stein as noting that Ulam was sloppier in his clothing afterwards, and John Oxtoby as noting that Ulam before the encephalitis could work for hours on end doing calculations, while when Rota worked with him, was reluctant to solve even a quadratic equation. This assertion was not accepted by Françoise Aron Ulam. By late April 1946, Ulam had recovered enough to attend a secret conference at Los Alamos to discuss thermonuclear weapons. Those in attendance included Ulam, von Neumann, Metropolis, Teller, Stan Frankel, and others.
|
|
The total prompt gamma ray energy in a fission explosion is 3.5% of the yield, but in a 10 kiloton detonation the triggering explosive around the bomb core absorbs about 85% of the prompt gamma rays, so the output is only about 0.5% of the yield. In the thermonuclear Starfish Prime the fission yield was less than 100% and the thicker outer casing absorbed about 95% of the prompt gamma rays from the pusher around the fusion stage. Thermonuclear weapons are also less efficient at producing EMP because the first stage can pre-ionize the air which becomes conductive and hence rapidly shorts out the Compton currents generated by the fusion stage. Hence, small pure fission weapons with thin cases are far more efficient at causing EMP than most megaton bombs.
|
|
Towards the end of the 1980s, as the decline of the Soviet Union puts it in danger of losing the Cold War, the Soviet leadership makes a desperate gamble to rearrange the global balance of power. Four large thermonuclear weapons are detonated in the ionosphere over the United States. The resulting electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) destroys the nation's communications and computer systems, cripples the U.S. electrical grid, and affects any equipment that relies on computer technology, such as most late-model automobiles. With its ICBMs inoperative—and the National Command Authority unable to contact U.S. military forces abroad or their foreign allies in western Europe to launch a counterattack—the U.S. is forced to accept Soviet terms for surrender: unilateral disarmament, the end of the dollar as a reserve currency, and integration into the Soviet military/economic bloc.
|
|
This energy, resulting from the neutron capture, is a result of the attractive nuclear force acting between the neutron and nucleus. It is enough to deform the nucleus into a double-lobed "drop", to the point that nuclear fragments exceed the distances at which the nuclear force can hold two groups of charged nucleons together and, when this happens, the two fragments complete their separation and then are driven further apart by their mutually repulsive charges, in a process which becomes irreversible with greater and greater distance. A similar process occurs in fissionable isotopes (such as uranium-238), but in order to fission, these isotopes require additional energy provided by fast neutrons (such as those produced by nuclear fusion in thermonuclear weapons). The liquid drop model of the atomic nucleus predicts equal-sized fission products as an outcome of nuclear deformation.
|
|
The Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) is the abbreviated name of the 1963 Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water, which prohibited all test detonations of nuclear weapons except for those conducted underground. It is also abbreviated as the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) and Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (NTBT), though the latter may also refer to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which succeeded the PTBT for ratifying parties. Negotiations initially focused on a comprehensive ban, but that was abandoned because of technical questions surrounding the detection of underground tests and Soviet concerns over the intrusiveness of proposed verification methods. The impetus for the test ban was provided by rising public anxiety over the magnitude of nuclear tests, particularly tests of new thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs), and the resulting nuclear fallout.
|
|
With a starting weight of 2200 tons and a nuclear warhead weighing 75 tons, its estimated nuclear yield (though unknown exactly) could surpass that of a 150 megaton-yield 40 ton warhead delivered by a UR-500 missile. The development of such weapons also required mandatory and practical aerial bombardment methods as, for a high-yield (thermo-)nuclear explosion to reach maximal effect, the payload has to be detonated at an optimal height for the shock wave to reach the greatest force and range. In addition, ultra-large-yield thermonuclear bombs were considered by the Long Range Aviation units of the USSR, as their use fits the "cause the greatest damage to the enemy with a minimal number of carriers (i.e. bombers)" doctrine, while it was also necessary to consider the practical feasibility of such heavy thermonuclear weapons with reliably predictable characteristics.
|
|
Because of the horrific nature of thermonuclear weapons, and the expectation that The Progressive would probably lose the case, mainstream media organizations feared that the result would be an erosion of freedom of the press. However, the court's role was to rule on whether publication was legal, not whether it was wise. In keeping with the usual practice of keeping a temporary restraining order in effect for as short a time as possible, Warren ordered that hearings be held on a preliminary injunction one week after the March 9 temporary restraining order. On March 16, the Progressive's attorneys filed an affidavit from Theodore Postol, an employee of the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, stating that the information contained in the Morland article could be derived by any competent physicist from Teller's article on the hydrogen bomb in the Encyclopedia Americana.
|
|
The decline in Australian support for testing was part of a worldwide trend that resulted in the moratorium on nuclear testing from November 1958 to September 1961. Maralinga was now redundant, as the Australian Government's restriction on testing thermonuclear weapons had led to the development of the Christmas Island test site, where there was no such restriction, and its favourable winds carried fallout away. With the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement, Britain also gained access to the Nevada Test Site, where the first British major test took place underground on 1 March 1962, but there was no certainty that Nevada would be available in the future. The 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty banned atmospheric testing, and no site was located at the Maralinga Range for underground testing; the nearest suitable site was on Aboriginal land away.
|
|
According to Arai, he does not view the daguerreotype as a piece of nostalgia used to harken back to the days of a classical method. He has taken the daguerrotype on as his own personal medium, saying that he finds it "a reliable device for storing memory that is far better for recording and transmitting interactions with his subjects than modern photography." Beginning in 2010, when he first became interested in nuclear issues, Arai has used the daguerreotype technique to create individual records—micro- monuments—of his encounters with people, objects, and places that had been through or affected by nuclear events. The first of these events was the Daigo Fukuryū Maru fishing boat, a vessel that was affected by nuclear fallout from the US’s thermonuclear weapon test at Bikini Atoll in 1954. Called Castle Bravo, the thermonuclear weapons test occurred on March 1, 1954.
|
|
The SHRIMP was at least in theory and in many critical aspects identical in geometry to the RUNT and RUNT II devices later proof-fired in Castle Romeo and Castle Yankee respectively. On paper it was a scaled-down version of these devices, and its origins can be traced back to the spring and summer of 1953. The United States Air Force indicated the importance of lighter thermonuclear weapons for delivery by the B-47 Stratojet and B-58 Hustler. Los Alamos National Laboratory responded to this indication with a follow-up enriched version of the RUNT scaled down to a 3/4 scale radiation-implosion system called the SHRIMP. The proposed weight reduction (from TX-17's to TX-21's ) would provide the Air Force with a much more versatile deliverable gravity bomb. The final version tested in Castle used partially enriched lithium as its fusion fuel.
|
|
In October 1969, the Nixon administration indicated to the Soviet Union that "the madman was loose" when the United States military was ordered to full global war readiness alert (unbeknownst to the majority of the American population), and bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons flew patterns near the Soviet border for three consecutive days. The administration employed the "madman strategy" to force the North Vietnamese government to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. In July 1969 (according to a CIA report declassified in February 2018), President Nixon may have suggested to South Vietnamese President Thieu that the two paths he was considering were either a nuclear weapons option or setting up a coalition government. Along the same lines, several American diplomats, staff members, friends, and family, knew about Nixon's conditions, knowing Nixon was also known to indulge in alcohol and had trouble battling insomnia, for which he was prescribed sleeping pills.
|
|
Castle Bravo fallout plume Much of the stimulus for the treaty was increasing public unease about radioactive fallout as a result of above-ground or underwater nuclear testing, particularly given the increasing power of nuclear devices, as well as concern about the general environmental damage caused by testing. In 1952–53, the US and Soviet Union detonated their first thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs), far more powerful than the atomic bombs tested and deployed since 1945. In 1954, the US Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll (part of Operation Castle) had a yield of 15 megatons of TNT, more than doubling the expected yield. The Castle Bravo test resulted in the worst radiological event in US history as radioactive particles spread over more than , affected inhabited areas (including Rongelap Atoll and Utirik Atoll), and sickened Japanese fishermen aboard the Lucky Dragon upon whom "ashes of death" had rained.
|
|
First test launch of the PGM-17 Thor from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 17B, January 25, 1957 Eisenhower held office during period in which both the United States and the Soviet Union developed nuclear stockpiles theoretically capable of destroying not just each other, but all life on Earth. The United States had tested the first atomic bomb in 1945, and both the superpowers had tested thermonuclear weapons by the end of 1953. Strategic bombers had been the delivery method of previous nuclear weapons, but Eisenhower sought to create a nuclear triad consisting of land-launched nuclear missiles, nuclear-missile- armed submarines, and strategic aircraft. Throughout the 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBMs) and intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBMs) capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Eisenhower also presided over the development of the UGM-27 Polaris missile, which was capable of being launched from submarines, and continued funding for long-range bombers like the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress.
|
|
At this time studies were also startedPRO AIR 2/13759 E18B that ultimately led to a decision in 1954 to develop a thermonuclear weapon, and the design studies were split into two tracks because the British at that time had not yet discovered the Teller-Ulam technique necessary to initiate fusion. One track led to an intermediate design, the so-called Type A thermonuclear design, similar to the 'Alarm Clock' and layer cake hybrid designs of other nuclear powers; although these designs are now regarded as large boosted fission weapons, and no longer regarded as thermonuclear weapons that derive a very large part of their energy from a fusion reaction, designated by the British as Type B, but as hybrids. The British hybrid weapon was known as Green Bamboo, weighed approx 4,500 lb (2,045 kg) and its spherical shape measured approx 45 inches diameter with a 72-point implosion system.PRO. AVIA 65/1193 E10A.
|
|
The Quebec Agreement of 1943 paved the way for the two countries to develop atomic weapons side by side, the UK handing over vital documents from its own Tube Alloys project and sending a delegation to assist in the work of the Manhattan Project. The US later kept the results of the work to itself under the postwar McMahon Act, but after the UK developed its own thermonuclear weapons, the US agreed to supply delivery systems, designs and nuclear material for British warheads through the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement. The UK purchased first Polaris and then the US Trident system which remains in use. The 1958 agreement gave the UK access to the facilities at the Nevada Test Site, and from 1963 it conducted a total of 21 underground tests there before the cessation of testing in 1991.'Time Runs Out as Clinton Dithers over Nuclear Test', Independent On Sunday (20 June 1993), p. 13.
|
|
Thus, they tended to disperse large amounts of unused fissile material, and the fission products, which are on average much more dangerous, in the form of nuclear fallout. During the 1950s, there was considerable debate over whether "clean" bombs could be produced and these were often contrasted with "dirty" bombs. "Clean" bombs were often a stated goal and scientists and administrators said that high-efficiency nuclear weapon design could create explosions which generated almost all of their energy in the form of nuclear fusion, which does not create harmful fission products. But the Castle Bravo accident of 1954, in which a thermonuclear weapon produced a large amount of fallout which was dispersed among human populations, suggested that this was not what was actually being used in modern thermonuclear weapons, which derive around half of their yield from a final fission stage of the fast fissioning of the uranium tamper of the secondary.
|
|
Israel is alleged to possess thermonuclear weapons of the Teller–Ulam design, but it is not known to have tested any nuclear devices, although it is widely speculated that the Vela Incident of 1979 may have been a joint Israeli–South African nuclear test... It is well established that Edward Teller advised and guided the Israeli establishment on general nuclear matters for some twenty years. Between 1964 and 1967, Teller made six visits to Israel where he lectured at the Tel Aviv University on general topics in theoretical physics. It took him a year to convince the CIA about Israel's capability and finally in 1976, Carl Duckett of the CIA testified to the U.S. Congress, after receiving credible information from an "American scientist" (Teller), on Israel's nuclear capability. During the 1990s, Teller eventually confirmed speculations in the media that it was during his visits in the 1960s that he concluded that Israel was in possession of nuclear weapons.
|
|
In 1972 the United States government declassified a document stating "[I]n thermonuclear (TN) weapons, a fission 'primary' is used to trigger a TN reaction in thermonuclear fuel referred to as a 'secondary'", and in 1979 added, "[I]n thermonuclear weapons, radiation from a fission explosive can be contained and used to transfer energy to compress and ignite a physically separate component containing thermonuclear fuel." To this latter sentence the US government specified that "Any elaboration of this statement will be classified."emphasis in original The only information that may pertain to the spark plug was declassified in 1991: "Fact that fissile or fissionable materials are present in some secondaries, material unidentified, location unspecified, use unspecified, and weapons undesignated." In 1998 the DOE declassified the statement that "The fact that materials may be present in channels and the term 'channel filler,' with no elaboration", which may refer to the polystyrene foam (or an analogous substance).
|
|
2 and David Binder, "C.I.A. says Israel has 10–20 A-bombs," The New York Times, March 16, 1976, p. 1. By 2002, it was estimated that the number had increased to between 75 and 200 thermonuclear weapons, each in the multiple-megaton range. Kenneth S. Brower has estimated as many as 400 nuclear weapons.. These can be launched from land, sea and air.. This gives Israel a second strike option even if much of the country is destroyed.. Notably, former U.S. President and Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter spoke at the 21st Hay Festival, May 25, 2008 as reported by REUTERS/Hayfestival.com under the heading, "Israel has at least 150 atomic weapons: Carter"- Carter addressed a news conference during the event; the following is a transcript of his remarks: “The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union (Russia) has about the same, Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more.
|
|
The exchange is notable for being one of three, along with the Kingsway Exchange in London and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester, that provided hardened facilities in order to protect communications in the event of a nuclear attack during the Cold War in the UK (a fourth one was rumoured to exist in Glasgow, but no evidence of this has been found). In common with most civil defence structures of the time it was designed to withstand an attack by an atomic bomb short of a direct hit. By the time of its completion in 1957, the development of thermonuclear weapons with their significantly increased explosive power, would have reduced the ability to resist an attack. It has been alleged that the workers involved in the construction were not aware that they were building a nuclear bunker, and they were not allowed to disclose to anyone, not even their close families, the work that they were involved in.
|
|
Oppenheimer was a late addition to the project in 1951, but wrote a key chapter of the report that challenged the doctrine of strategic bombardment and advocated for smaller tactical nuclear weapons which would be more useful in a limited theater conflict against enemy forces. Strategic thermonuclear weapons delivered by long-range jet bombers would necessarily be under control of the U.S. Air Force, whereas the Vista conclusions recommended an increased role for the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy as well. The Air Force reaction to this was immediately hostile, and they succeeded in getting the Vista report suppressed. During 1952 Oppenheimer chaired the five-member State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, which first urged that the United States postpone its planned first test of the hydrogen bomb and seek a thermonuclear test ban with the Soviet Union, on the grounds that avoiding a test might forestall development of a catastrophic new weapon and open the way for new arms agreements between the two nations.
|
|
Members of the Soviet military–industrial complex also opposed a test ban, though some scientists, including Igor Kurchatov, were supportive of antinuclear efforts. France, which was in the midst of developing its own nuclear weapon, also firmly opposed a test ban in the late 1950s. The proliferation of thermonuclear weapons coincided with a rise in public concern about nuclear fallout debris contaminating food sources, particularly the threat of high levels of strontium-90 in milk (see the Baby Tooth Survey). This survey was a scientist and citizen led campaign which used "modern media advocacy techniques to communicate complex issues" to inform public discourse. Its research findings confirmed a significant build-up of strontium-90 in bones of babies and helped galvanise public support for a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing in the US. Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller, dubbed the "father of the hydrogen bomb," both sought to tamp down on these fears, arguing that fallout [at the dose levels of US exposure] were fairly harmless and that a test ban would enable the Soviet Union to surpass the US in nuclear capabilities.
|
|
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the leadership of the Soviet Union feared the United States would use its nuclear superiority to its advantage, as from 1945 to 1948 the U.S. was the only state possessing nuclear weapons. The USSR countered by rapidly developing their own nuclear weapons, surprising the US with their first test in 1949. In turn, the U.S. countered by developing the vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapon, testing their first hydrogen bomb in 1952 at Ivy Mike, but the USSR quickly countered by testing their own thermonuclear weapons, with a test in 1953 of a semi-thermonuclear weapon of the Sloika design, and in 1956, with the testing of Sakharov's Third Idea – equivalent to the Castle Bravo device. Meanwhile, tensions between the two nations rose as 1956 saw the suppression of Hungary by the Soviets; the U.S. and European nations drew certain conclusions from that event, while in the U.S., a powerful social backlash was afoot, prompted by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, U.S. citizens executed in 1953 after conviction of espionage.
|
|
Hermes and Bulwark were larger, and offered better silencing and hangar capacity. The Labour Government's priority was to arm aircraft in West Germany with tactical and thermonuclear weapons and, secondly, amphibious support of the British Army in Norway. Provision of nuclear depth charges for anti-submarine, aircraft carriers and destroyers and frigates was limited and late, although approval to wire all the , and ships for triggering NDB was given in 1969, and frigates and destroyers offered quieter listening platforms than the old Tigers. The proposed class of four large Type 82 destroyers fitted with nuclear Ikara anti-submarine missiles could have been a more reliable nuclear deterrent, but the British Ikara missile was ultimately fitted only to carry conventional Mark 46 torpedoes, while only one Type 82, , was built; this ship lacked even a helicopter hangar, and was plagued by problems common with dated and complex steam propulsion. Crewing and developing large cruiser size warships with steam propulsion was becoming more difficult in the RN, contributing to the issues in Tiger and the much later Type 82 destroyer. With no other approved option, in 1965, work began on Blake to convert her to a helicopter cruiser while Tiger began her conversion in 1968.
|
|