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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (4600)	10/12/2001 7:11:26 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 281500

>>It's my understanding that unless the material is contained, like by an explosive force, the fluid dynamic nature of the material at high temperature will just physically blow it apart producing a dirty, low yield explosion from the heat.<< According to my husband, your understanding is correct. If you put two subcritical masses of fissile material together and make a critical mass, the reaction will be a melt-down, releasing heat and radiation, but not an explosion. Something like this happened at Los Alamos in 1945, when researchers were trying to determine the critical mass of uranium, by putting two masses on a device and putting them close to each other. Somehow the two masses stuck together and a reaction started. One brave soul physically separated the masses. He died, but no one else did - not sure if anyone else was injured. You can bring masses of uranium 235 together very fast and make a bomb - Little Boy had a cordite charge which shot a uranium bullet into a uranium target. This isn't hard to construct but getting uranium 235 isn't easy. You can't do that with plutonium - you need a very complicated implosion device. I've seen the diagram for Fat Man - it's a doozy. Information partially from "The Making of the A Bomb," Richard Rhodes - and my husband is an engineer. He says that Tom Clancy has also written an excellent book, "The Sum of All Fears," which describes terrorists creating a hydrogen device and exploding it at the Superbowl.