The land of the flighty

[--Pete]

Hi,

The technology to make the detonators all detonate properly and at the same millisecond is the real crux on making a compressive bomb work. I'm not sure NK has the technology to actually make those.

That's 1940's thinking. Millisecond????? That's forever. That's practically DC. Thirty years ago, when I did the experiments for my dissertation, the total amount of data I obtained was nine shots, with four to eight channels each taken over about 50 nanoseconds. That was multiple channels of data, synchronized to within 2 nanosecond for all channels. And it was all done with commercial, analog, off the shelf, unclassified components. Modern electronics, especially digital, are much faster and have less jitter.

NK could pretty much get everything they need for the fuzing (except the fuzes) at a rat-shack and photo shop. The fuzes they could get from any explosives supplier (commercial standard fuzes, used in building demolition). And commercially available explosives, such as DuPont's detasheet, are uniform enough in their C/J point shock velocity that you can get the necessary spherical wave.

As for the technical knowledge, most of it is readily available. At one time, the ability to do the design calculations was a limiting factor, but modern personal computers are more than sufficient for the task, and almost all the pertinent algorithms have been published from John Von Neumann's artificial viscosity to keep the intrinsic and extrinsic matrices in sync to the full ionization values for almost all materials. Just go to any good university library and search physics abstracts, especially The Journal of Applied Physics.

I don't know where you got the notion that there's any real limitation on building nuclear weapons other than obtaining the fissionable material, but I don't think that that notion is right.

--Pete