Who Built the Smallest Nuclear Bomb & Could Anyone Do It?

Comments · 865

• CU

  @CuriousDroid · 1 year ago · pinned

  Get 10% off &quot;The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding A Civilization&quot; here <a href="https://bit.ly/4lGk4EY">https://bit.ly/4lGk4EY</a> with the code CURIOUSDROID10

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• KE

  @Kevin-ht1ox · 1 year ago

  Your video reminded me about my father. &nbsp;My father applied to MIT graduate school so that he could work on the Primary Guidance System for the Lunar Lander. &nbsp;He got rejected because he&apos;s always been a lousy student. He actually kept his rejection letter. &nbsp;Instead of MIT, he went to work for TRW to work on what was called the Backup Guidance System - later renamed the Abort Guidance System. &nbsp;The job of the AGS was to detect certain problems and take over control in certain emergency situations. &nbsp;The clincher to the story is that the Abort Guidance System prevented a collision during Lunar Module/Command Module docking for Apollo 11 and later was used by Apollo 13 as its guidance system because the primary guidance system used too much energy -- in both missions it saved their lives.<br>So my father got rejected by the people who built the primary guidance system for Apollo and went on to work on designing the backup guidance system which ended up compensating for the failures of MIT.

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• CR

  @crazy8sdrums · 1 year ago

  It would be a lot easier for someone to produce a nuclear weapon from scratch than it would be for someone to produce a modern CPU from scratch.

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• RA

  @randomwarehouse4702 · 1 year ago

  Welcome to the watchlist, gentlemen. This is the price we pay for taking Tylenol.

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• BI

  @BillionairesAreNotBulletproof · 1 year ago (edited)

  When he works with homemade explosives, its cool. But when i do, I’m labeled a domestic terrorist.

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• DU

  @dukenukem8381 · 1 year ago

  If nukes can fit into 152 mm shell it can be fit in the suitcase.

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• JP

  @jpeterson303 · 4 months ago

  Ted Taylor an John Nuckolls were the GREATEST BOMB-DESIGNERS EVER!! 🇺🇸♥️🇺🇸♥️

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• JO

  @johno1544 · 1 year ago

  A design using just a kilogram of Plutonium and 10 kg overall is wild I never knew they could get that small

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• DD

  @ddichny · 11 months ago

  Speaking of the nuclear-bomb-powered Orion spaceship design, the 1985 sci-fi novel &quot;Footfall&quot; (by Niven and Pournelle) has humans secretly build one out of desperation to use as a battleship against invading aliens. &nbsp;When they launch it, there&apos;s a great line by one of the passengers who describes the feeling as, &quot;God was knocking, and he wanted in BAD&quot;.

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• KE

  @KenLieck · 1 year ago

  A friend of mine had some sort of private sector job that gave him work clearance to enter one of these government nuclear sites. He says one time when he was there they were selling or auctioning off obsolete stuff and for laughs he bid on a nuclear device or materials (I&apos;m fuzzy on details) and won! Needless to say the bidding/sale was never meant to be open to the public, but they said he had to make good on his bid/pur hase, which he did. He then tried to leave his &quot;prize&quot; there, but they said that since he had paid for it he owned it and he had to take it. <br><br>When he tried to leave, however, the guards freaked out and despite his attempt at explanation they arrested him on very serious charges. He then produced his receipt and offered to give the item back, but again he was told that was not acceptable. In the end, he says, the only resolution available was that he <b>sell</b> it back to the government at its full market value, which I believe he said was in the five if not six figure range! <br><br>In the end, I&apos;d say that was an intense but extremely productive day!

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• GA

  @gandalfgreyhame3425 · 11 months ago (edited)

  The book &quot;The Curve of Binding Energy&quot; goes into detail about the life and work of Theodore Taylor. &nbsp;BTW, Taylor never became an anti-nuclear activist. &nbsp;He only tried to warn against the lack of security in keeping safe nuclear materials like Plutonium. &nbsp; &nbsp; One of Taylor&apos;s last projects was Project Orion, which an atomic engine powered by a large number of small nuclear bombs blowing up in series behind a large blast shield. &nbsp;It says in the book that Taylor could build an atomic bomb the size of a rugby football.

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• SU

  @Superwip · 11 months ago

  A not so well known fact is, that it is much, much easier than ever before to build very efficient and/or small fission (and fusion) bombs.<br><br>The basic principles are public knowledge today, like, for example, the (super-) criticality requirements, pre-ignition issues, explosive lens designs, Plutonium and Uranium processing, material issues and requirements and so on.<br><br>Modern computers, CAD and FEM software makes it much easier to design and optimize bombs without testing them. Modern electronics makes it much easier to develop and build very precise multi-point ignition systems. 3D printers and CNC-machines make it compareably very cheap and easy to manufacture explosive lenses and fission pits (including non-sperical ones like in the otherwise very simple 1- and 2- point ignition implosion bomb designs). Polymer foams, back in the 1950s an expensive high-tech material, make it not only possible but also cheap and easy to fill void sections in implosion bombs while keeping the assembly robust.<br><br>Getting large enough ammounts of pure enough fissionable material remains the only part which is so difficult that it can not be done by a handfull of engineers and technicians in a small workshop. But even this most difficult step is much easier nowadays than it has been a few decades ago. Improvements in material technology, process engineering and machine building made it much, much easier to build enrichment plants, especially centrifuge plants. North Korea, Pakistan and Iran have shown that this technology can be mastered even by relatively small, isolated nation states with limited industrial capacities and know-how.

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