The crucial detail to buy the story is that Jim Frank told Dobson and Selden the truth:
They were pulled aside by a senior researcher, Jim Frank. "Jim said, 'I bet you guys want to know how it turned out,'" Dobson recalls. "We said yes. And he told us that if it had been constructed, it would have made a pretty impressive bang." How impressive, they wanted to know. "On the same order of magnitude as Hiroshima," Frank replied.
The way the project was described to work, information was going only one way (from students to researchers) with the flow the other way on a strict need-to-know basis (where need-to-know means need to know in order to deliver the results). Once the students delivered the results, there was absolutely no need for them to know if their design was successful or not. It is incredibly naive to think this was not classified.
There are now a number of options: 1. Frank disclosed classified information, 2. Frank told them some bullshit, following some instructions, 3. Frank didn't tell them anything, and Dobson and Seldon were instructed what to say if anyone asks them, 4. the whole episode is come corrupted memory: maybe Frank gave them a nice pat on the back and decades later Dobson remembered a much more impressive congratulations, just like hunters remember they shot a bigger game than they did.
From all these options I find the first one the most unlikely. By far.
I believe it's fairly well understood that designing a theoretical atom bomb that probably works isn't "difficult", the difficulty is building it. The logistics, and procuring the materials, that's very very hard.
Also note, they did not cover refining the fissile material as part of their process, it was assumed that they had that. Arguably it's the refining that's by far the most difficult process.
> Arguably it's the refining that's by far the most difficult process
I think a large part of what makes it difficult is not the logistics, or even the refinement process. It's the other states looking over and thinking "these guys are making atom bombs", then putting a stop to it. Much like the Iranian attempt where the US injected a worm into the centrifuges that caused them to spin themselves to death.
That kind of dramatic industrial espionage just isn’t very common outside of fiction. Uranium enrichment really is that difficult due to the precision required to build gaseous centrifuges and the nasty hydrofluoric acid chemistry involved. ITAR and other restrictions on sale of advanced machinery has much more effect than espionage - the latter is more likely to spread the technology like with Dr Khan and Pakistan/North Korea
On top of that, uranium is naturally 99.3% is non-fissile so you need tons of yellowcake to produce a small amount of weapons grade uranium, which requires crazy amount of power for the centrifuges.
Iran and North Korea have managed to figure it out. Note that the concern/news around Iran is their ability to make fissionable material, and not their ability to build a bomb if they have that material. The principals behind the bomb are (particularly the WWII bombs) are not that difficult to figure out. You can find pictures and diagrams with a simple google search. Even in WWII the hard part was getting material, not the design itself.
Making fissionable material is also conceptually easy, but the process is tricky to do without killing yourself. Still Iran has figured it out from publicly available sources (and a lot of smart people). (as the other reply points out, the process is also leaves signs that other nations are likely to pick up on)
edit: I'm not sure if Iran actually has made a working bomb, but the general consensus is they have the ability. If they don't have one it is only because between diplomatic pressure and sabotage they haven't got that far yet - absent of those two they would.
Yup. A gun-type fission bomb is very straightforward if you have access to U235.
Like fission WILL happen, the question is yield. Is it going to fizzle or will a large fraction of the fuel be burned up?
They talk about how to encourage the latter in the paper:
“The most important feature of the assembly times calculated in subsection
(6) above is that they are more than 10 times the total fission chain reaction
time. This means that it is essential for the fissile material to be neutron
free during the assembly or the reaction will take place prematurely.
If the fissile material is neutron free, then it is necessary to "turn on” neutrons to initiate the chain reaction at the desired time. This is the role of
the so-called initiator”
Looking at the now-unclassified report, it appears that the results were disclosed, though, in a way that seems generally consistent with the article. Page 8 of the linked PDF (the report of this experiment, heavily redacted for public release, even now; note that it was edited by Frank) says that the outcome of the experiment was disclosed to the designers:
Building a bomb isn’t a secret. Tom Clancy wrote a very technically detailed description of the tooling and process and building of a nuclear weapon in 1991 in The Sum of All Fears.
There's only so much you can do to keep an 80 year old technology developed with slide rules from being reverse engineered by a dedicated group of scientists with the benefit of 80 years of advancements in physics and access to a supercomputer (ie an iPhone).
Nuclear secrecy is a fascinating blog about this sort of thing. The designation “top secret” was first used for the Manhattan project, which of course the military developed in secret, and then unleashed upon an unsuspecting world by announcing it had destroyed the two Japanese cities.
But still to this day, all the nuclear weapons stuff is shrouded in mystery and secrecy. How they dispose of the waste … classified, how the bombs work, people have ideas, but all classified. The nuclear policy is also opaque and non-democratic.
Knowledge is determined by official government sources now?
We know they have the bomb, nothing in Middle Eastern geopolitics makes sense except in light of this fact. It's like a black hole that you can observe by how it bends the light of objects behind it. Politicians have to play a silly game of pretend around the whole thing but normal people don't.
That's not 100% true though, but for the most part it is. The moment Israel demonstrates that they do have the bomb; for instance by using one or exploding one for test purposes the perception of Israel would change and this in turn would cause a change in attitude towards Israel. It would also telegraph what kind of yields they have which would say a lot about their capabilities. They are clearly very much aware of this and that is the main reason for the 'refuse to confirm or deny'. Some things are more powerful when left to the imagination of the perceived enemies.
There are a number of countries that are not officially listed as having nuclear weapons, but probably do, because of how easy they are to build in the 21st century. Japan is one common example of a state that is officially not a nuclear state, but people generally consider them de facto one anyhow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_progr...
I mean, ultimately, we're talking about a device that was built nearly 90 years ago. They've only gotten easier to build since then. Absent international regulation and oversight, a motivated startup and modestly-well-funded startup could put them together today, no problem. Not the deluxe MIRV ICBMs nation states have, but something on par with the ones used in WWII? No problem.
Having a bomb and delivering a working bomb to a target are vastly different things.
If a country has a bomb, then they have a bomb sitting around somewhere. It is common knowledge that the nuclear superpowers have a lot of trouble, especially these days, around maintenance and infrastructure. You've got to develop and build good missiles or aircraft to send those bombs out somewhere, and you've got to maintain the whole chain in working order for as long as it takes. They've probably got to stay on high alert 24/7, because you never know when you'll need to press the button and send the bomb to the target.
Just building a nuclear bomb without its concomitant delivery system means you'll have to get creative to deliver it. Good luck putting it on on a truck and driving it to the target or something. At that point, you'd rather just have a dirty bomb instead: a lot easier to make, and just deliver it to a convenient highly-populated spot where it'll make a big stink.
South Korea is taking an interesting approach. They have been building the delivery systems, cruise missiles, IRBMs, and SSBNs, that are useful conventionally but could be adapted for nuclear warheads.
Confirmation or denial wouldn't mean a thing, the real confirmation will come from either an insider leak (unlikely), a test (unlikely) or actual use (unlikely). So to all intents and purposes it is better if this is never resolved one way or the other, but the smart money is on Israel having between 80 and 100 warheads, with various bits of evidence to back that up. The bigger question in my opinion is what size those warheads are rather than whether they have them or not and whether or not any of them are H-Bombs rather than just fission devices. Other questions revolve around operational readiness.
Let's hope we'll never know for sure because I believe the most likely of those three unlikely possibilities is actual use. And that would be very bad news for the world indeed.
>the real confirmation will come from either an insider leak (unlikely)
Already happened years ago, see elsewhere in this thread. There's also the Vela incident, for which one of the few plausible explanations is an Israeli-SouthAfrican bomb test.
"Many critics argue that Vanunu had no additional information that would pose a real security threat to Israel and that its government's only motivation is to avoid political embarrassment and financial complications for itself and allies such as the United States. By not acknowledging possession of nuclear weapons, Israel avoids a US legal prohibition on funding countries that proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Such an admission would prevent Israel from receiving over $2 billion each year in military and other aid from Washington."
Which is another very high likelihood option with regards to the reason for this policy.
I'm aware of that but it didn't - as far as I understand it - conclusively prove that the Israelis actually had working devices and could well have been a misinformation campaign. I've read a lot about this and even though that would be quite far out I can't rule out the possibility, there are just too many layers to all of this to know with 100% certainty what is true and what is not.
Also note that we're talking about the present, what happened years ago may or may not be reflective of what the situation was back then, but it definitely won't say much about what the state of affairs is today.
The end of that second paragraph is the most 2003 thing, I remember the media elevating the fear around these issues so much:
> Today, the fear is back: with al-Qaida resurgent, North Korea out of control, and nuclear rumours emanating from any number of "rogue states", we cling, at least, to the belief that not just anyone could figure out how to make an atom bomb. The trouble is that, 40 years ago, anyone did.
The limiting factor is access to materials, tools, instruments, and "engineering capabilities". Access to these can be controlled. Joe's machine shop can not gain access to plutonium, or enough uranium to enrich to build a bomb.
Achieving it with household items would be very special.
Can't they all -- except the production of plutonium in a reactor -- be made with upscaled garage tech?
Uranium isotope separation can be done with lasers, for example, instead of the masses of Zippe centrifuges that used to be required (or the absolutely enormous air diffusion plants and calutrons the Manhattan Project used).
If that's true, then the question becomes "how to produce a compact, cheap plutonium breeding reactor" + "how to separate out the plutonium". Both without dying, of course.
The conventional explosion can be simulated quite well on laptops now + small models can be tested. Exploding bridgewires are an off the shelf item now and not something Alvarez has to invent first. Do we need a big "beach ball" of large exploding lenses? Probably not. Not if we can simulate the explosion well enough (and we can add reflectors).
So how does The Serious Hacker get access to the explosives? Maybe make them in the garage with an upscale chemistry set?
The neutron generator is probably the easiest part to build these days.
So... the reactor and plutonium extraction are likely the limiting steps for a small but determined group of people. I bet lots and lots of cooling is necessary while the reactor operates. That'll be hard to hide!
I think that's one of the easier parts. Even if you have to mine it yourself somewhere in Greenland, Australia, or Northern Sweden (where I presume you are from), it shouldn't be too hard.
(Only the Swedes and the Finns do the ':' thing when they add an inflection to an abbreviation.)
so 2,5 months with ~11,2tons of adsorbent material spread over a few square miles of sea should give you the needed 25kg. That still needs to be enriched, but once in operation a system like this generates about 125kg uranium/year. (if you need more or faster just scale the system, plenty of space within the 12 mile zone)
The British Royal Navy did secretly run a reactor in the middle of London for decades without anyone really noticing though, but obviously they didn't really have to hide it from the security services which might be harder.
> Today, the fear is back: with al-Qaida resurgent, North Korea out of control, and nuclear rumours emanating from any number of "rogue states",
North Korea indeed got the bomb three years after the article was written - the interesting question is what kept Iran? They didn't manage that feat in 20 years (thankfully, to add).
Stuxnet (which caused Iran's ultra-centrifuges to self destruct), the deal to not further their nuclear ambitions (JCPOA) which bought a lot of time, the fairly credible threat that Israel will commit a first strike against any Iranian facility if they feel like it is imminent.
The right choice for Iran is to stay close enough to completion of a bomb that it's a very credible threat to stave off US regime change; while staying far enough away to not provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. So it's not a technology calculation, but a geo political one.
As the other commenter says - North Korea isn't connected to the internet in any meaningful way so it's impossible to cyber sabotage their gas centrifuges remotely. Without the correct type of uranium, you can't build an a-bomb.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet: "typically introduced to the target environment via an infected USB flash drive, thus crossing any air gap."
IMHO being connected to the internet or not doesn't play a role here.
But then it sidesteps the need for a U235 enrichment process. One can start from the wrong type of uranium. The downside is you can't use the simple gun-type assembly for the warhead. You must be able to assemble a tricky implosion-type device.
But doesn’t it just then mean you have to enrich deuterium? At some point you’re still needing a massive industrialized process, you just have to pick your position, no?
Iran’s air gapped computers for their centrifuges were hit. Stuxnet and its deployment remains one of the greatest hacks we know about. Kim Zetter wrote a good book about it.
Iran weren't trying to build a weapon, according to US intelligence. They want to do peaceful nuclear research. The Ayatollah also put a fatwa on nuclear weapons, calling them "satanic".
It's arguably also in their interest strategically to be in a position where they are perpetually a couple of months away from making one but not to actually take that final step.
I don't think it is unreasonable to consider that they have the material stocked away somewhere ready to go. But more balanced gameplan makes more sense to them than to NK.
After all many other countries in area have nuclear weapons.
I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb - has also been carried out? How the Teller-Ulam design works has been public for a long time...
Yeah but don’t you need a lot of lithium deuteride, and some tritium, which is not that easy to make. But it’s been done by at least 5 countries, including China, India, North Korea …
But the Teller Ulam designs are never complete, always redacted, obviously. You still gotta reverse engineer it.
Well I guess that latter point is my real question - what would happen if you took one of the diagrams and the associated descriptions from something like "Dark Sun" and simply built it - what would happen?
The Ivy Mike device (apart from the primary) didn't sound like it required huge precision - I'm sure "Dark Sun" refers to the radiation case being filled with expanded polystyrene held in place by copper nails hammered into place.
The Ivy Mike device used cryogenic liquid deuterium instead of solid lithium-6 hydride, so the secondary was very different from any sort of practical hydrogen bomb. Maybe the tolerances were looser for the Ivy Mike device, maybe not, but I wouldn't draw many conclusions from it.
Ivy Mike was also a much larger experimental apparatus. In addition to liquid deuterium cooling, it's possible the designers used other mechanisms to relax tolerances such as.
1. Using a much larger fission yield then necessary
2. Using a much larger/denser elispes than necessary to avoid manufacturing errors becoming problematic.
3. Using a much more massive reflector than necessary.
The goal of the Ivy Mike test was to validate the concept of the design - not necessarily to validate that it could be made into a practical bomb. I'm not sure if its ever been revealed wether the filler for the shell has any significance towards the final device.
Are you hiring machinists to build it, or are you hiring some engineers and physicists to design a bomb based on that design. Building according to the plans - we can assume some important details are left out, or sabotaged so that it looks like it will work but it won't. However engineers and physicists can start with those plans and run calculations/simulations/tests to figure out what will go wrong and then figure out something to make it work.
What I meant was following the same kind of exercise described in the article but for an thermonuclear weapon rather than a fission device - excluding the primary component.
There are a lot more hurdles to making a proper thermo-nuclear bomb. Implosion type bombs which form the initial boost of Teller-Ulam designs are much more complex to implement because the explosive shell needs to be set off simultaneously so that it properly crushes the fissile material.
>I wonder if the next step - designing a thermonuclear device given an A-bomb
And then there's the theoretical possibility of designing a thermonuclear device without the A-bomb part. I remember skimming through a paper from someone from CERN about it; https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071.pdf is the guy, but I'm not sure that's the exact paper.
AI does not require access to highly enriched Uranium or a plant to make it as well as various other highly controlled substances. AI materials can be copied across the internet with great ease, which does not hold for nuclear bombs either.
A highly-enriched uranium fission bomb is conceptually and practically simple to construct. The hard part is getting enough HEU. That part isn't even hard to achieve (North Korea managed it after all), just moderately expensive and hard to conceal. This process and the bomb design is explained in detail in the nuclear non-proliferation documentary, "Countdown to Zero" (2010): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572769
The amount of HEU needed for a device of this type with a yield comparable to Little Boy could fit in a shoebox. Seal it in some lead pipe, stick it in a shipping container and no one would know. The above documentary illustrates this powerfully with animations and expert testimony. Strongly recommended, especially as a companion to "Command and Control" (2016): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5598206/
The crucial detail to buy the story is that Jim Frank told Dobson and Selden the truth:
The way the project was described to work, information was going only one way (from students to researchers) with the flow the other way on a strict need-to-know basis (where need-to-know means need to know in order to deliver the results). Once the students delivered the results, there was absolutely no need for them to know if their design was successful or not. It is incredibly naive to think this was not classified.There are now a number of options: 1. Frank disclosed classified information, 2. Frank told them some bullshit, following some instructions, 3. Frank didn't tell them anything, and Dobson and Seldon were instructed what to say if anyone asks them, 4. the whole episode is come corrupted memory: maybe Frank gave them a nice pat on the back and decades later Dobson remembered a much more impressive congratulations, just like hunters remember they shot a bigger game than they did.
From all these options I find the first one the most unlikely. By far.