The land of the flighty

[Lissa]

Hi,
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

And you listed what the US government watches for. Those items are a lot more difficult to make than people realize. They have to be very precise and all go off nearly simultaneously or you get a fizzle. You need near perfect compression of the pit to the proper critical density to get a chain that will continue long enough to make a strong explosion.

Something of note, Littleboy had a lot more potential explosive power than it actually released because of using the gun type weapon system (and appearent thought now is that NK's test was a Littleboy style weapon). Gun type weapon systems are inherently fizzle weapons. IIRC, Littleboy's main core piece, the one that the additional piece was fire into, was 80% of a critical mass in it's own right (the other piece was somewhere on the odds of 40%). The mass disassociated well before the maximum energy release was achieved (I can't remember the exact percentage). Still that's nothing to sneeze at, but that does mean that putting something like this on a missile and getting to the US is not very feasible, but it does pose a great deal of issues for SK, Japan, China, and Russia.