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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (72952)	2/28/2005 10:51:57 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

I like to recall nuclear proliferation success stories. Take South Africa. They had developed nuclear technology and nuclear weapons. They got rid of their nuclear weapons, after years of external pressure, but mainly because they decided they didn't need or want them. Argentina and Brazil are two other countries that started down the path to bombs, but then thought better of it. The US and Russia are very poor examples here. We've reduced our arsenals from completely slobbering nuts to just insane. I'd much rather have Iran following Argentina's or Brazil's example. I can't see where Bush telling them what to do has any moral weight, especially after just invading Iraq for control of oil resources. We're one of the reasons they WANT a nuke, and I can't really blame them. I didn't vote for the guy. "This initial fission weapon design was not an implosion device. Rather, it was really just a glorified cannon. In such a "gun type" design, a shell of fissile material is fired down a gun barrel into a hollow fissile target fastened to the other end of the barrel. Once united, the two sub-critical pieces form a supercritical mass and detonate. Since no compression of the fissile material occurs in such a design, it requires a lot of fissile material, and what it uses, it uses inefficiently. Nevertheless, it was clear in 1943 that a gun-type weapon would work. Shortly after the first plutonium emerged from the pilot scale X-10 reactor at Oak Ridge in the summer of 1944, the existence of another plutonium isotope, Pu-240, was confirmed. It was formed in the reactor when Pu-239 captured a neutron but did not immediately fission. Pu-240 spontaneously fissioned at a rate much greater than Pu-239. Thus, Pu-240 proved to be a potent neutron source, as some had anticipated.(6) More importantly, the supercritical mass in a gun weapon is assembled at a rate which turned out to be too slow to allow a gun weapon to be made with plutonium, because it spontaneously emits neutrons at a rate likely to cause predetonation. Implosion solved this design challenge at the cost of some increase in complexity. Implosion assembly of a supercritical mass occurs much more quickly than gun assembly, allowing the use of plutonium. Thus the first design challenge of the nuclear age involved a choice between a very simple gun weapon using HEU which was very expensive to produce, and a more complicated implosion weapon using plutonium which was somewhat less difficult to obtain. In the event, the Manhattan Project pursued both options. Alongside the Fat Man plutonium weapon, Los Alamos also designed an HEU gun bomb called Little Boy. Its designers were confident enough of success on the first try that Little Boy was "tested" over Hiroshima. Gun-type weapons using HEU remain the simplest of fission weapons. Early postwar, air-delivered, earth penetration bombs used gun designs because their simple assembly mechanism could function even after the shock of a high velocity impact. Later, certain nuclear artillery shells used a gun firing the shell, and because such weapons could be made with small diameters. "