I think you have that backward. The "Little boy" gun bomb used U-235 and "Fat Man" implosion bomb used plutonium. That is why newcomers to the nuclear arms race are enriching uranium. The gun bomb is a whole lot simpler to build.
You're right. I was thinking that plutonium was easier to make critical but it was actually harder. It was much easier to produce, which is why all the work was put into developing Fat Man.
Probably depends on how much air is in the water.
That was my understanding too. I don't think any explosive or probably anything at all can compress a metal to half it's volume.
Maybe I should change that to nothing here on the planet can compress a metal to half it's volume.
That's wrong, it was early gun type bombs that used uranium, implosion devices use plutonium because plutonium required it. AFAIK, the US only set off one of gun type, the bomb at Hiroshima.
That's wrong too. The first uranium pile at the University of Chicago went critical when the graphite moderating rods were removed, starting the first nuclear fission reactor and nothing was compressed with explosives or anything else at all.
Plutonium bombs, at least the first 2, the plutonium sphere was solid except for a small "initiator" at the center (that, when the core was compressed, furnished neutrons to start the chain reaction). The plutonium core (and the "damper" around it) were, in fact, compressed to
1/2 their volume.
As in other posts, U235 bombs were a gun type. The uranium "bullet" was not half the uranium mass.
Plutonium bombs could have used a "gun" mechanism. The problem is that plutonium has natural decay that produces neutrons that would cause a chain reaction before the 2 masses were fully together. That chain reaction would produce a heat explosion that would blow the parts apart. That would result in a weak partial explosion.
The implosion bomb created a critical mass by compression in a much shorter time.
The "perfect timing" of the explosions (multiple) was a major engineering problem that was solved with "explosive lenses".
Water, and solids, are incompressible in the world we live in. My point was that they are, in fact, compressible. And that does not require the total energy of the sun.
The first test at Alamogordo was a plutonium implosion bomb. There were questions whether the implosion process could be made to work. Uniform compression with explosives was a big engineering problem.
The second bomb used, at Nagasaki, was also plutonium implosion.
Hiroshima was uranium gun type.
Gravity can do it, like in a neutron star or a black hole. That really doesn't have anything to do with what goes on here tho. For all practical purposes, water don't compress and if you don't have something to deal with expansion something is going to break or pop open, like that TPS valve. Unfortunately they have a bad habit of not sealing back up again.
Trinity was an implosion bomb.
I see that you can't read, either.
Right. They KNEW the gun bomb was going to work. They weren't sure the lenses would work.
Obviously air compresses but so does water (and everything else). Water compresses a _lot_ less than air but it's not so different than a lot of other liquids.
Actually, the first plutonium based bomb was a gun-type (little boy) and the first uranium based bomb was an implosion type (fat man).
Think of a soccer ball and replace each hexagon with high explosive with the U235 in the center. Make sure that the detonator wires feeding the explosive hexagons are _exactly_ the same length.
I suppose you should fly out to New Mexico and set those government people at Trinity site right.
"The world?s second atomic bomb, codenamed ?Little Boy,? was exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Three days later, a third bomb codenamed ?Fat Man,? devastated the city of Nagasaki. The Hiroshima bombing was the second artificial nuclear explosion in history, after the Trinity test, and the first uranium-based detonation. The bombs exploded at Trinity Site and Nagasaki had plutonium cores. A ?Fat Man? bomb casing is on display in front of the WSMR visitor center."
You got it backwards too. Fat Man was a plutonium bomb (implosion) and Little Boy was uranium (gun).
Plutonium at the center.
Backwards, as has been corrected several times.
Also previously explained - why plutonium has to be implosion.
Wouldn't think the time delay of a few feet of wire at the speed of light would be a problem.
The real problem was that if the explosive was a hexagon, and you detonated it at the center of the hexagon, the explosion would propagate through the explosive to hit the core under the detonator significantly faster than it would propagate to the edges of the hexagon. That would not produce a uniform compression on the core and the core deforms. The fix was to use "explosive lenses", which used both a fast and slower explosive.
Even back in the 360/370 days they spec'ed the wire length when you were wiring boards. It seemed silly sometime to use a foot of wire to go 2" but you needed to so you would not screw up the timing. All of the wires to a gate were the same length, no matter where they came from.
The fission bomb trigger does not have hydrogen in its core. They are separate, and I think a significant part of the explosion is x-rays from the fission bomb compressing the hydrogen.
The original test used both duterium (H2) and tritium (H3) (but not hydrogen).
I think there is a second chemical so both duterium and tritium are made by the original fission explosion.
The first H-bomb test used both duterium and tritium. Both had to be liquid. Liquid hydrogen has to be near absolute zero. The bomb included a major cooling plant - not so good for a bomb (but it was a test). Lithim duteride eliminated that.
Tritium is (was?) also very expensive to make. And I think you're right about decay.
Guess it depends on how you look at it. The h1,h2,h2 can all be called hydrogen as a general word. Just as there is water and heavy water.
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