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• Thursday, September 11, 2008 02:04 PM

  Godot

  It only takes a few pounds to make a bomb.

  It takes about 10 kilograms (22lbs) of purified Plutonium 239 to make a nuclear warhead.

  Xanthro--Creating a sustained critical chain reaction is an exceedingly complicated process.

  Controlling a chain reaction is complicated, nitwit. Creating one isn't. How controlled do you think an atomic bomb is?

  It's exceedingly controlled, that is why they are so hard to make.

  A great amount of heat and pressure must be applied to trigger an nuclear denotation. There are two common methods to do so, (though only one is used commonly today) Gun and Implosion. Only implosion is used in modern weapons. Basically a ball of weapons grade material is surrounded by explosives, (which if you really want to know, I can list exactly what the US uses. It's not classified) which are detonated almost instantaneously on all sides, created pressure on the fizzle material. This pressure must be maintained long enough for the proper yields to develop. That's the controlled and vastly complicated part. If one part of the initial implosion is slightly slower, faster, weaker or stronger, the weapon will destroy itself before reaching the criticality of an actual nuclear detonation.

  And these are just atomic bombs. The thermonuclear device is detonated by the much smaller atomic bomb and is vastly more powerful. Got any idiotic lying propaganda about those?

  -- Godot.

  I'm not sure what you are tying to say here. Neither the US nor Russia use "atomic bombs" in the sense that they are fission only devices. H-Bombs, or hydrogen bombs produce much bigger yields, measured in megatons, but they are used mostly because they are more efficient. They are actually fission, fusion, fission devices and far more complicated to make.

  The problem is that a 500 kiloton warhead is not nearly 5 times more powerful than a 100 kiloton warhead.

  For example,

  Name Yield Fireball Radius

  FatMan 20kt .2 km

  W88 350kt .64 km

  W59 1,000kt .96 km

  Castle Bravo 15,000kt 2.84 km

  Tzar Bomba 50,000kt 4.6 km

  Tzar Bomba is 2500 times the yield of FatMan, yet only has a fireball radius 23 timer greater.

  That is why nuclear weapons yields have been going down for decades. Almost all active US weapons have yield less than 1,000kt.

  While the US has over 30,000 nuclear warheads, we currently maintain 5,500 in a state of readiness and a further few thousand in reserve. A nuclear devices must be periodically disassembled and rebuilt because their nuclear triggers, either Polonium-210 or Tritium decay and must be replaced.

  Once again, the US can't destroy all life on Earth.

  —Xanthro Read Xanthro's other letters
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