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

To: Bilow who wrote (124855)	2/20/2004 12:37:52 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi all; I found a cool web source of information on nuke design: nuclearweaponarchive.org It gives a reason I hadn't thought of for keeping the neutron multiplication factor of a weapon low. The close you are to critical, the more susceptible the weapon is to predetonation due to neutron influx from outside (as in another nuke going off). Now it would certainly be embarrassing if you had a global thermonuclear war and only half of the thousands of hydrogen bombs went off, so you can be sure that the engineers took care of that problem, LOL. And another reason for fission weapons having a shelf life is given. That is that they may have a neutron source, which is a material intended to shower the compressed uranium with neutrons (i.e. after the chemical explosion) so as to initiate it. If the initiator is missing, you may not get the fireworks. It's a long, detailed, and fascinating article, and I'll post further as I learn more. -- Carl

To: Bilow who wrote (124855)	2/20/2004 1:50:50 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

OT - Hi Bilow: I hope we dont get raised brows from Ken for spending the bandwith on the subject - ell, I'll put an OT up from. OK, that's done. Half-life of a given element does not change. It's as constant as electron charge or age of universe or alpha. What does change, is the composition of the weapon ("how long until half of the weapon material is gone") or its durability / half-life (again, of weapon - iow "How long until 50% of weapons are useless for the mission"). Now I'll read on. It looks thou like they knew what they were doing (sg). re >>Using a "neutron multiplication" factor of k = 0.9, it's easy enough to compute that each natural decay produces 0.9/(1 - 0.9) = 9 induced decays, for a total of 10 decays.<< Huh? One natural decay produces 0.9 additional (due to thermalisation or whatever). Were it >9< additional, whew ... I suggest, we go PM and yes I'll look it up in the wikipedia.

To: Bilow who wrote (124855)	2/20/2004 2:53:19 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Carl, thanks for the detail. Thinking about deteriorating nukes due to natural fission processes, it's obvious that the rate of deterioration is in the order of at least lots of decades or the things would melt. One megaton of Uranium fission [let's forget about fusion for now] is a LOT of energy. To get the energy released from a 1 metre diameter bomb equivalent to say 1000 kilotons or even say 10,000 kilotons for a 1% degradation, that's a heck of a lot of energy. 10 million kilograms of oil [near enough to some TNT in energy content] would provide sufficient energy to keep a 1 metre bomb red hot for decades. So I think you must be right that deterioration is very slow. Okay, I've convinced myself that noocular bombs will last for a decade at least, which is long enough for the purposes of AlQ to smuggle them into the USA. Mqurice