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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (59059)	10/14/1999 12:56:00 AM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Our nuclear arsenal depends on chemical and nuclear components that have to be held within VERY narrow dimensional and operational specs. The course of compressing a nuclear charge by using an implosion is very prone to chaotic disruption ... turbulence is the bombmaker's enemy. Controlling the chemical implosion wavefront to within a millimeter requires that the entire string of firing events - capacitor triggering, charge propagation down the wiring harness, vaporization of the wire detonators and their expansion onto the explosive, detonation wavefront propagation into the two-texture "lensed" explosive blocks - accumulate total timing error of less than a tenth of a microsecond. These tolerances are repeated on the second implosion stage - the "thermonuclear" stage. Both the first nuclear stage and the second fusion stage on US devices rely on tritium - a material that turns to helium-3, a dreadful neutron poison. The explosive and fissile components cannot be stored or remanufactured indefinitely, "borderline condition" tests need to be periodically run in order to be sure that the whole thing will work. So the trade-off of not testing is balancing a steady loss of USA weapon reliability against the possibility of denying someone else's engineers of building lightweight (rocket-deliverable) fusion bombs of useful yield. The first aircraft-deliverable hydrogen bomb weighed twenty tons. By 1970 ICBM warheads (the familiar "ice cream cones") packed an entire robot bomb (safety, guidance, fuzing, firing mechanisms... heat shield, etc.) with potentially 600 kilotons yield into as many pounds.