BIIIGGG bomb - what's TMH doing about it ?

[The Medway Handyman]

My timber merchant might have trouble....

[The Medway Handyman]

Not Medway, Sheerness.

Sheerness is like Wotfud, but with water nearby.

[tony sayer]

Kevlar one of course;?..

[geoff]

In message , Nick Leverton writes

The equivalent of building on a flood plain - you might get wet

[geoff]

Nothing at all like watford - it doesn't even start with a "W"

[Andy Champ]

I'm sure I remember hearing somewhere once that TNT degrades to nitroglycerine.

Andy

[Bob Eager]

Has your neighbour got any CCTV footage of you?

[The Medway Handyman]

According to Wikipedia they are the same thing;

Nitroglycerin (NG), (the American spelling) also known as nitroglycerine (the British spelling), trinitroglycerin, trinitroglycerine,

1,2,3-trinitroxypropane and glyceryl trinitrate

Trinitroglycerine being TNT?

[dennis]

[John Williamson]

TNT is Trinitrotoluene. (Tri)nitroglycerine is a different compound entirely. TNT was originally used as a dye, while Nitroglycerine is used to help with some heart conditions.

a complete assessment.

[The Medway Handyman]

Stupid boy :-)

[Jules Richardson]

What, like a good punch in the chops?

[John Rumm]

I think you are thinking of Dynamite... (which is basically nitroglycerine impregnated into an inert base material like clay. However with poor handing it can sweat and become unstable again).

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Tibbits flew at 5000ft for the arming, iirc.

There was. There were several circuits that had to be completed before it could actually go off properly, in a drop.

Just a fizzle. A fecking destructive and lethal fizzle for the crew and anything within a good distance, but not a proper bang anything like the design called for.

Oh, aye. Little Boy always was a bastard design, supposed to be a quick and dirty route to a guaranteed bang, but ironically the plutonium plants produced much more Pu in the end than the Uranium purification plants did at enormous cost.

[Andy Dingley]

Although Little Boy had several electrical interlocks, it was still one-point unsafe once fuzed and could potentially have gone off in a serious mechanical accident. This would have been a full nuclear yield

- if the gun fired, there was no safety mechanism to prevent the full nuclear yield. Some later weapons did have such devices, most simply metal neutron absorbers such as aluminium chains that were pulled clear at the last moment, or the British design of a casing filled with steel ball bearings that had to be poured out first.

Little Boy wasn't a solution to a lack of Pu, but to a perceived lack of the right isotope of Pu. The "Pu Crisis" was when they realised that only one of the isotopes being produced would be usable. This reduced production rate, as it meant that the reactor fuel cycle had to be shortened, and also complicated weapon design. At one point there was a serious question as to whether the implosion bomb would be possible / practical, and even if it was in theory, whether there would be enough Pu to deliver it.

In the end there was so much spare usable Pu that Gadget could be tested at Trinity, before the bombers were ready to deliver the first weapon.