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Everything about Nuclear Weapons Design totally explained

Nuclear weapon designs are physical, chemical, and engineering arrangements that cause the physics package of a nuclear weapon to detonate. There are three basic design types. In all three, the explosive energy is derived primarily from nuclear fission, not fusion.
  • Pure fission weapons were the first nuclear weapons built and the only type ever used in warfare. The active material is fissile uranium (U-235) or plutonium (Pu-239), explosively assembled into a chain-reacting critical mass by one of two methods:
    • Gun assembly, in which one piece of fissile uranium is fired down a gun barrel to a fissile uranium target at the end of the barrel (plutonium can use this design, but it has proven to be wildly impractical), or
    • Implosion, in which a fissile mass of either material (U-235, Pu-239, or a combination) is surrounded by high explosives which compress it, turning the sub-critical mass into a critical mass.
  • Fusion-boosted fission weapons improve on the implosion design. The high temperature and pressure environment at the center of an exploding fission weapon compresses and heats a mixture of tritium and deuterium gas (heavy isotopes of hydrogen). The hydrogen fuses to form helium and free neutrons. The energy release from fusion reactions is relatively negligible, but each neutron starts a new fission chain reaction, greatly reducing the amount of fissile material that would otherwise be wasted. Boosting can more than double the weapon's fission energy release.
  • Two-stage thermonuclear weapons are essentially a daisy chain of fusion-boosted fission weapons, with only two daisies, or stages, in the chain. The second stage, called the "secondary," is imploded by x-ray energy from the first stage, called the "primary." This radiation implosion is much more effective than the high-explosive implosion of the primary. Consequently, the secondary can be many times more powerful than the primary, without being bigger. The secondary could be designed to maximize fusion energy release, but in most designs fusion is employed only to drive or enhance fission, as it's in the primary. More stages could be added, but the result would be a multi-megaton weapon too powerful to be useful. (The United States briefly deployed a three-stage 25-megaton bomb, the B41, starting in 1961. Also in 1961, the Soviet Union tested, but didn't deploy, a three-stage 50-megaton device, Tsar Bomba.)
Pure fission weapons are always the first type to be built by a nation state, and, if such a thing should happen, would be the type built by a non-state terrorist organization,. Large industrial states with well-developed nuclear arsenals have two-stage thermonuclear weapons, which are the most compact, scalable, and cost effective option once the necessary industrial infrastructure is built.
   All innovations in nuclear weapon design originated in the United States; the following descriptions feature U.S. designs.
   In early news accounts, pure fission weapons were called atomic bombs or A-bombs, a misnomer since the energy comes only from the nucleus of the atom. Weapons involving fusion were called hydrogen bombs or H-bombs, also a misnomer since their destructive energy comes mostly from fission. Insiders favored the terms nuclear and thermonuclear, respectively.
   The term thermonuclear refers to the high temperatures required to initiate fusion. It ignores the equally important factor of pressure, which was considered secret at the time the term became current. Many nuclear weapon terms are similarly inaccurate because of their origin in a classified environment. Some are nonsense code words such as "alarm clock" (see below).

Nuclear reactions

Nuclear fission splits the heaviest of atoms to form lighter atoms. Nuclear fusion bonds together the lightest atoms to form heavier atoms. Both reactions generate roughly a million times more energy than comparable chemical reactions, making nuclear bombs a million times more powerful than non-nuclear bombs.
   In some ways, fission and fusion are opposite and complementary reactions, but the particulars are unique for each. To understand how nuclear weapons are designed, it's useful to know the important similarities and differences between fission and fusion. The following explanation uses rounded numbers and approximations.

Fission

Fission can be self-sustaining because fission produces more neutrons of the speed required to cause new fissions. When a free neutron hits the nucleus of a fissionable atom like uranium-235 (235U), the uranium splits into two smaller atoms called fission fragments, plus more neutrons.
   The uranium atom can split any one of dozens of different ways, as long as the atomic weights add up to 236 (uranium plus the extra neutron). The following equation shows one possible split, namely into strontium-95 (95Sr), xenon-139 (139Xe), and two neutrons (n), plus energy:
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Pure fission or fusion-boosted fission weapons can be made to yield hundreds of kilotons, at great expense in fissile material and tritium, but by far the most efficient way to increase nuclear weapon yield beyond ten or so kilotons is to tack on a second independent stage, called a secondary.
   In the 1940s, bomb designers at Los Alamos thought the secondary would be a canister of deuterium in liquified or hydride form. The fusion reaction would be D-D, harder to achieve than D-T, but more affordable. A fission bomb at one end would shock-compress and heat the near end, and fusion would propagate through the canister to the far end. Mathematical simulations showed it wouldn't work, even with large amounts of prohibitively expensive tritium added in.
   The entire fusion fuel canister would need to be enveloped by fission energy, to both compress and heat it, as with the booster charge in a boosted primary. The design breakthrough came in January of 1951, when Edward Teller and Stanisław Ulam invented radiation implosion - for nearly three decades known publicly only as the Teller-Ulam H-bomb secret.
   The concept of radiation implosion was first tested on May 9, 1951, in the George shot of Operation Greenhouse, Eniwetok, yield 225 kilotons. The first full test was on November 1, 1952, the Mike shot of Operation Ivy, Eniwetok, yield 10.4 megatons.
   In radiation implosion, the burst of x-ray energy coming from an exploding primary is captured and contained within an opaque-walled radiation channel which surrounds the nuclear energy components of the secondary. For a millionth of a second, most of the energy of several kilotons of TNT is absorbed by a plasma (superheated gas) generated from plastic foam in the radiation channel. With energy going in and not coming out, the plasma rises to solar core temperatures and expands with solar core pressures. Nearby objects which are still cool are crushed by the temperature difference.
   The cool nuclear materials surrounded by the radiation channel are imploded much like the pit of the primary, except with vastly more force. This greater pressure enables the secondary to be significantly more powerful than the primary, without being much larger.
   For example, for the Redwing Mohawk test on July 3, 1956, a secondary called the Flute was attached to the Swan primary. The Flute was 15 inches (38 cm) in diameter and 23.4 inches (59 cm) long, about the size of the Swan. But it weighed ten times as much and yielded 24 times as much energy (355 kilotons, vs 15 kilotons).
   Equally important, the active ingredients in the Flute probably cost no more than those in the Swan. Most of the fission came from cheap U-238, and the tritium was manufactured in place during the explosion. Only the spark plug at the axis of the secondary needed to be fissile.
   A spherical secondary can achieve higher implosion densities than a cylindrical secondary, because spherical implosion pushes in from all directions toward the same spot. However, in warheads yielding more than one megaton, the diameter of a spherical secondary would be too large for most applications. A cylindrical secondary is necessary in such cases. The small, cone-shaped re-entry vehicles in multiple-warhead ballistic missiles after 1970 tended to have warheads with spherical secondaries, and yields of a few hundred kilotons.
   As with boosting, the advantages of the two-stage thermonuclear design are so great that there's little incentive not to use it, once a nation has mastered the technology.
   In engineering terms, radiation implosion allows for the exploitation of several known features of nuclear bomb materials which heretofore had eluded practical application. For example:
  • The best way to store deuterium in a reasonably dense state is to chemically bond it with lithium, as lithium deuteride. But the lithium-6 isotope is also the raw material for tritium production, and an exploding bomb is a nuclear reactor. Radiation implosion will hold everything together long enough to permit the complete conversion of lithium-6 into tritium, while the bomb explodes. So the bonding agent for deuterium permits use of the D-T fusion reaction without any pre-manufactured tritium being stored in the secondary. The tritium production constraint disappears.
  • For the secondary to be imploded by the hot, radiation-induced plasma surrounding it, it must remain cool for the first microsecond, for example, it must be encased in a massive radiation (heat) shield. The shield's massiveness allows it to double as a tamper, adding momentum and duration to the implosion. No material is better suited for both of these jobs than ordinary, cheap uranium-238, which happens, also, to undergo fission when struck by the neutrons produced by D-T fusion. This casing, called the pusher, thus has three jobs: to keep the secondary cool, to hold it, inertially, in a highly compressed state, and, finally, to serve as the chief energy source for the entire bomb. The consumable pusher makes the bomb more a uranium fission bomb than a hydrogen fusion bomb. It is noteworthy that insiders never used the term hydrogen bomb.
  • Finally, the heat for fusion ignition comes not from the primary but from a second fission bomb called the spark plug, imbedded in the heart of the secondary. The implosion of the secondary implodes this spark plug, detonating it and igniting fusion in the material around it, but the spark plug then continues to fission in the neutron-rich environment until it's fully consumed, adding significantly to the yield. The initial impetus behind the two-stage weapon was President Truman's 1950 promise to build a 10-megaton hydrogen superbomb as America's response to the 1949 test of the first Soviet fission bomb. But the resulting invention turned out to be the cheapest and most compact way to build small nuclear bombs as well as large ones, erasing any meaningful distinction between A-bombs and H-bombs, and between boosters and supers. All the best techniques for fission and fusion explosions are incorporated into one all-encompassing, fully-scalable design principle. Even six-inch diameter nuclear artillery shells can be two-stage thermonuclears.
       In the ensuing fifty years, nobody has come up with a better way to build a nuclear bomb. It is the design of choice for the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and China, the five thermonuclear powers. The other nuclear-armed nations, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea, probably have single-stage weapons, possibly boosted.

    Interstage

    In a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, three types of energy emerge from the primary to impact the secondary: the expanding hot gases from high explosive charges which implode the primary, plus the electromagnetic radiation and the neutrons from the primary's nuclear detonation. An essential energy transfer modulator called the interstage, between the primary and the secondary, protects the secondary from the hot gases and channels the electromagnetic radiation and neutrons toward the right place at the right time.
       There is very little information in the open literature about the mechanism of the interstage. Its first mention in a U.S. government document formally released to the public appears to be a caption in a recent graphic promoting the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program. If built, this new design would replace "toxic, brittle material" and "expensive 'special' material" in the interstage. This statement suggests the interstage may contain beryllium to moderate the flux of neutrons from the primary, and perhaps something to absorb and re-radiate the x-rays in a particular manner.
       The interstage and the secondary are encased together inside a stainless steel membrane to form the canned subassembly (CSA), an arrangement which has never been depicted in any open-source drawing. The most detailed illustration of an interstage shows a British thermonuclear weapon with a cluster of items between its primary and a cylindrical secondary. They are labeled "end-cap and neutron focus lens," "reflector/neutron gun carriage," and "reflector wrap." The origin of the drawing, posted on the internet by Greenpeace, is uncertain, and there's no accompanying explanation.

    Specific designs

    While every nuclear weapon design falls into one of the above categories, specific designs have occasionally become the subject of news accounts and public discussion, often with incorrect descriptions about how they work and what they do. Examples:

    Hydrogen bombs

    All modern nuclear weapons make some use of D-T fusion. Even pure fission weapons include neutron generators which are high-voltage vacuum tubes containing trace amounts of tritium and deuterium.
       However, in the public perception, hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs, are multi-megaton devices a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima's Little Boy. Such high-yield bombs are actually two-stage thermonuclears, scaled up to the desired yield, with uranium fission, as usual, providing most of their destructive energy.
       The idea of the hydrogen bomb first came to public attention in 1949, when prominent scientists openly recommended against building nuclear bombs more powerful than the standard pure-fission model, on both moral and practical grounds. Their assumption was that critical mass considerations would limit the potential size of fission explosions, but that a fusion explosion could be as large as its supply of fuel, which has no critical mass limit. In 1949, the Russians exploded their first fission bomb, and in 1950 President Truman ended the H-bomb debate by ordering the Los Alamos designers to build one.
       In 1952, the 10.4-megaton Ivy Mike explosion was announced as the first hydrogen bomb test, reinforcing the idea that hydrogen bombs are a thousand times more powerful than fission bombs.
       In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer was labeled a hydrogen bomb opponent. The public didn't know there were two kinds of hydrogen bomb (neither of which is accurately described as a hydrogen bomb). On May 23, when his security clearance was revoked, item three of the four public findings against him was "his conduct in the hydrogen bomb program." In 1949, Oppenheimer had supported single-stage fusion-boosted fission bombs, to maximize the explosive power of the arsenal given the trade-off between plutonium and tritium production. He opposed two-stage thermonuclear bombs until 1951, when radiation implosion, which he called "technically sweet," first made them practical. He no longer objected. The complexity of his position wasn't revealed to the public until 1976, thirteen years after his death.
       When ballistic missiles replaced bombers in the 1960s, most multi-megaton bombs were replaced by missile warheads (also two-stage thermonuclears) scaled down to one megaton or less.

    Alarm Clock/Sloika

    The first effort to exploit the symbiotic relationship between fission and fusion was a 1940s design that mixed fission and fusion fuel in alternating thin layers. As a single-stage device, it would have been a cumbersome application of boosted fission. It first became practical when incorporated into the secondary of a two-stage thermonuclear weapon.
       The U.S. name, Alarm Clock, was a nonsense code name. The Russian name for the same design was more descriptive: Sloika, a layered pastry cake. A single-stage Russian Sloika was tested on August 12, 1953. No single-stage U.S. version was tested, but the Union shot of Operation Castle, April 26, 1954, was a two-stage thermonuclear code-named Alarm Clock. Its yield, at Bikini, was 6.9 megatons.
       Because the Russian Sloika test used dry lithium-6 deuteride eight months before the first U.S. test to use it (Castle Bravo, March 1, 1954), it was sometimes claimed that Russia won the H-bomb race. (The 1952 U.S. Ivy Mike test used cryogenically-cooled liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel in the secondary, and employed the D-D fusion reaction.) However, the first Russian test to use a radiation-imploded secondary, the essential feature of a true H-bomb, was on November 23, 1955, three years after Ivy Mike.

    Clean bombs

    On March 1, 1954, America's largest-ever nuclear test explosion, the 15-megaton Bravo shot of Operation Castle at Bikini, delivered a promptly lethal dose of fission-product fallout to more than 6,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean surface. Radiation injuries to Marshall Islanders and Japanese fishermen made that fact public and revealed the role of fission in hydrogen bombs.
       In response to the public alarm over fallout, an effort was made to design a clean multi-megaton weapon, relying almost entirely on fusion. Since it takes roughly five megatons of fusion to produce the same blast and fire effect as one megaton of fission, the clean bomb needed to be very large. For the first and only time, a third stage, called the tertiary, was added, using the secondary as its primary. The device was called Bassoon. It was tested as the Zuni shot of Operation Redwing, at Bikini on May 28, 1956. With all the uranium in Bassoon replaced with a substitute material such as lead, its yield was 3.5 megatons, 85% fusion and only 15% fission.
       On July 19, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss said the clean bomb test "produced much of importance . . . from a humanitarian aspect." However, two days later the dirty version of Bassoon, with the uranium parts restored, was tested as the Tewa shot of Redwing. Its 5-megaton yield, 87% fission, was deliberately suppressed to keep fallout within a smaller area. This dirty version was later deployed as the three-stage, 25-megaton Mark-41 bomb, which was carried by U.S. Air Force bombers, but never tested at full yield.
       As such, high-yield clean bombs were a public relations exercise. The actual deployed weapons were the dirty version, which maximized yield for the same size device.

    Cobalt bombs

    A fictional doomsday bomb, made popular by Neville Shute's 1957 novel, and subsequent 1959 movie, On the Beach, the cobalt bomb was a hydrogen bomb with a jacket of cobalt metal. The neutron-activated cobalt would supposedly have maximized the environmental damage from radioactive fallout. This bomb was popularized as the 'Doomsday Device' in the 1964 film 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb' in the film the bomb brings about the end of mankind by covering the planet in a radioactive shroud for 93 years. The element added to the bombs is referred to in the film as 'cobalt-chlorium G'
       Such "salted" weapons were requested by the U.S. Air Force and seriously investigated, possibly built and tested, but not deployed. In the 1964 edition of the DOD/AEC book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, a new section titled Radiological Warfare clarified the issue. Fission products are as deadly as neutron-activated cobalt. The standard high-fission thermonuclear weapon is automatically a weapon of radiological warfare, as dirty as a cobalt bomb.
       Initially, gamma radiation from the fission products from an equivalent size fission-fusion-fission bomb are much more intense than Co-60: 15,000 times more intense at 1 hour; 35 times more intense at 1 week; 5 times more intense at 1 month; and about equal at 6 months. Thereafter fission drops off rapidly so that Co-60 fallout is 8 times more intense than fission at 1 year and 150 times more intense at 5 years. The very long lived isotopes produced by fission would overtake the 60Co again after about 75 years.

    Fission-fusion-fission bombs

    In 1954, to explain the surprising amount of fission-product fallout produced by hydrogen bombs, Ralph Lapp coined the term fission-fusion-fission to describe a process inside what he called a three-stage thermonuclear weapon. His process explanation was correct, but his choice of terms caused confusion in the open literature. The stages of a nuclear weapon are not fission, fusion, and fission. They are the primary, the secondary, and, in one exceptionally powerful weapon, the tertiary. Each of these stages employs fission, fusion, and fission.

    Neutron bombs

    While high-yield clean bombs were never deployed, some low-yield clean bombs were. Officially known as enhanced radiation weapons, ERWs, they're more accurately described as suppressed yield weapons. When the yield of a nuclear weapon is less than one kiloton, its lethal radius from blast, 700 m (2300 ft), is less than that from its neutron radiation. If a one-kiloton ERW is exploded 800 m above ground, buildings at ground zero will survive but people in them will die of radiation illness caused by neutrons and other fireball radiation.
       Although the buildings would survive the blast, neutron activation would make them radioactive. If detonation occurred at a lower altitude, the full force of one kiloton (for example, four thousand 500 lb bombs) would flatten them. ERWs were two-stage thermonuclears with all non-essential uranium removed to minimize fission yield. Fusion provided the neutrons. Developed in the 1950s, they were first deployed in the 1970s, by U.S. forces in Europe. The last ones were retired in the 1990s.
    tandard nhanced
    Blast 50% 40%
    Thermal energy 35% 25%
    Instant radiation 5% 30%
    Residual radiation 10% 5%
    Samuel Cohen in 1958 investigated a low-yield 'clean' nuclear weapon and discovered that the 'clean' bomb case thickness scales as the cube-root of yield. So a larger percentage of neutrons escapes from a small detonation, due to the thinner case required to reflect back X-rays during the secondary stage ignition. For example, a 1-kiloton bomb only needs a case 1/10th the thickness of that required for 1-megaton.
       So although most neutrons are absorbed by the casing in a 1-megaton bomb, in a 1-kiloton bomb they'd mostly escape. A neutron bomb is only feasible if the yield is sufficiently high that efficient fusion stage ignition is possible, and if the yield is low enough that the case thickness won't absorb too many neutrons. This means that neutron bombs have a yield range of 1-10 kilotons, with fission proportion varying from 50% at 1-kiloton to 25% at 10-kilotons (all of which comes from the primary stage). The neutron output per kiloton is then 10-15 times greater than for a pure fission implosion weapon or for a strategic warhead like a W87 or W88.

    Oralloy thermonuclear warheads

    In 1999, nuclear weapon design was in the news again, for the first time in decades. In January, the U.S. House of Representatives released the Cox Report (Christopher Cox R-CA) which alleged that China had somehow acquired classified information about the U.S. W88 warhead. Nine months later, Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese immigrant working at Los Alamos, was publicly accused of spying, arrested, and served nine months in pre-trial detention, before the case against him was dismissed. It isn't clear that there was, in fact, any espionage.
       In the course of eighteen months of news coverage, the W88 warhead was described in unusual detail. The New York Times printed a schematic diagram on its front page. The most detailed drawing appeared in A Convenient Spy, the 2001 book on the Wen Ho Lee case by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, adapted and shown here with permission.
       Designed for use on Trident II (D-5) submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the W88 entered service in 1990 and was the last warhead designed for the U.S. arsenal. It has been described as the most advanced, although open literature accounts don't indicate any major design features that were not available to U.S. designers in 1958.
       The above diagram shows all the standard features of ballistic missile warheads since the 1960s, with two exceptions that give it a higher yield for its size.
  • The outer layer of the secondary, called the "pusher," which serves three functions: heat shield, tamper, and fission fuel, is made of U-235 instead of U-238, hence the name Oralloy (U-235) Thermonuclear. Being fissile, rather than merely fissionable, allows the pusher to fission faster and more completely, increasing yield. This feature is available only to nations with a great wealth of fissile uranium. The U.S. is estimated to have 500 tons.
  • The secondary is located in the wide end of the re-entry cone, where it can be larger, and thus more powerful. The usual arrangement is to put the heavier, denser secondary in the narrow end for greater aerodynamic stability during re-entry from outer space, and to allow more room for a bulky primary in the wider part of the cone. (The W87 warhead drawing in the previous section shows the usual arrangement.) Because of this new geometry, the W88 primary uses compact conventional high explosives (CHE) to save space, rather than the more usual, and bulky but safer, insensitive high explosives (IHE). The re-entry cone probably has ballast in the nose for aerodynamic stability. Notice that the alternating layers of fission and fusion material in the secondary are an application of the Alarm Clock/Sloika principle.

    Reliable replacement warhead

    The United States hasn't produced any nuclear warheads since 1989, when the Rocky Flats pit production plant, near Boulder, Colorado, was shut down for environmental reasons. With the end of the Cold War coming two years later, the production line has remained idle except for inspection and maintenance functions.
       The National Nuclear Security Administration, the latest successor for nuclear weapons to the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy, has proposed building a new pit facility and starting the production line for a new warhead called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). Two advertised safety improvements of the RRW would be a return to the use of "insensitive high explosives which are far less susceptible to accidental detonation," and the elimination of "certain hazardous materials, such as beryllium, that are harmful to people and the environment." Since the new warhead wouldn't require any nuclear testing, it couldn't use a new design with untested concepts.

    The Weapon Design Laboratories

    Berkeley

    The first systematic exploration of nuclear weapon design concepts took place in the summer of 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. Important early discoveries had been made at the adjacent Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, such as the 1940 production and isolation of plutonium. A Berkeley professor, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had just been hired to run the nation's secret bomb design effort. His first act was to convene the 1942 summer conference.
       By the time he moved his operation to the new secret town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the spring of 1943, the accumulated wisdom on nuclear weapon design consisted of five lectures by Berkeley professor Robert Serber, transcribed and distributed as the Los Alamos Primer. The Primer addressed fission energy, neutron production and capture, nuclear chain reactions, critical mass, tampers, predetonation, and three methods of assembling a bomb: gun assembly, implosion, and "autocatalytic methods," the one approach that turned out to be a dead end.

    Los Alamos

    At Los Alamos, it was found in April 1944 by Emilio G. Segrè that the proposed Thin Man Gun assembly type bomb wouldn't work for plutonium because of predetonation problems caused by Pu-240 impurities. So Fat Man the Implosion type bomb was given high priority as the only option for plutonium. The Berkeley discussions had generated theoretical estimates of critical mass, but nothing precise. The main wartime job at Los Alamos was the experimental determination of critical mass, which had to wait until sufficient amounts of fissile material arrived from the production plants: uranium from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and plutonium from the Hanford site in Washington.
       In 1945, using the results of critical mass experiments, Los Alamos technicians fabricated and assembled components for four bombs: the Trinity Gadget, Little Boy, Fat Man, and an unused spare Fat Man. After the war, those who could, including Oppenheimer, returned to university teaching positions. Those who remained worked on levitated and hollow pits and conducted weapon effects tests such as Crossroads Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
       All of the essential ideas for incorporating fusion into nuclear weapons originated at Los Alamos between 1946 and 1952. After the Teller-Ulam radiation implosion breakthrough of 1951, the technical implications and possibilities were fully explored, but ideas not directly relevant to making the largest possible bombs for long-range Air Force bombers were shelved.
       Because of Oppenheimer's initial position in the H-bomb debate, in opposition to large thermonuclear weapons, and the assumption that he still had influence over Los Alamos despite his departure, political allies of Edward Teller decided he needed his own laboratory in order to pursue H-bombs. By the time it was opened in 1952, in Livermore, California, Los Alamos had finished the job Livermore was designed to do.

    Livermore

    With its original mission no longer available, the Livermore lab tried radical new designs, that failed. Its first three nuclear tests were fizzles: in 1953, two single-stage fission devices with uranium hydride pits, and in 1954, a two-stage thermonuclear device in which the secondary heated up prematurely, too fast for radiation implosion to work properly.
       Shifting gears, Livermore settled for taking ideas Los Alamos had shelved and developing them for the Army and Navy. This led Livermore to specialize in small-diameter tactical weapons, particularly ones using two-point implosion systems, such as the Swan. Small-diameter tactical weapons became primaries for small-diameter secondaries. Around 1960, when the superpower arms race became a ballistic missile race, Livermore warheads were more useful than the large, heavy Los Alamos warheads. Los Alamos warheads were used on the first intermediate-range ballistic missiles, IRBMs, but smaller Livermore warheads were used on the first intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, SLBMs, as well as on the first multiple warhead systems on such missiles.
       In 1957 and 1958 both labs built and tested as many designs as possible, in anticipation that a planned 1958 test ban might become permanent. By the time testing resumed in 1961 the two labs had become duplicates of each other, and design jobs were assigned more on workload considerations than lab specialty. Some designs were horse-traded. For example, the W38 warhead for the Titan I missile started out as a Livermore project, was given to Los Alamos when it became the Atlas missile warhead, and in 1959 was given back to Livermore, in trade for the W54 Davy Crockett warhead, which went from Livermore to Los Alamos.
       The period of real innovation was ending by then, anyway. Warhead designs after 1960 took on the character of model changes, with every new missile getting a new warhead for marketing reasons. The chief substantive change involved packing more fissile uranium into the secondary, as it became available with continued uranium enrichment and the dismantlement of the large high-yield bombs.

    Explosive testing

    Nuclear weapons are designed by trial and error. The trial often involves exploding a prototype.
       In a nuclear explosion, a large number of discrete events, with various probabilities, aggregate into short-lived, chaotic energy flows inside the device casing. Complex mathematical models are required to approximate the processes, and in the 1950s there were no computers powerful enough to run them properly. Even today's computers and their codes are not fully adequate.
       It was easy enough to design reliable weapons for the stockpile. If the prototype worked, it could be weaponized and mass produced.
       It was much more difficult to understand how it worked or why it failed. Designers gathered as much data as possible during the explosion, before the device destroyed itself, and used the data to calibrate their models, often by inserting fudge factors into equations to make the simulations match experimental results. They also analyzed the weapon debris in fallout to see how much of a potential nuclear reaction had taken place.

    Light pipes

    An important tool for test analysis was the diagnostic light pipe. A probe inside a test device could transmit information by heating a plate of metal to incandescence, an event that could be recorded at the far end of a long, very straight pipe.
       The picture below shows the Shrimp device, detonated on March 1, 1954 at Bikini, as the Castle Bravo test. Its 15-megaton explosion was the largest ever by the United States. The silhouette of a man is shown for scale. The device is supported from below, at the ends. The pipes going into the shot cab ceiling, which appear to be supports, are diagnostic light pipes. The eight pipes at the right end (1) sent information about the detonation of the primary. Two in the middle (2) marked the time when x-radiation from the primary reached the radiation channel around the secondary. The last two pipes (3) noted the time radiation reached the far end of the radiation channel, the difference between (2) and (3) being the radiation transit time for the channel.
       From the shot cab, the pipes turned horizontal and traveled 7500 ft (2.3 km), along a causeway built on the Bikini reef, to a remote-controlled data collection bunker on Namu Island.
       While x-rays would normally travel at the speed of light through a low density material like the plastic foam channel filler between (2) and (3), the intensity of radiation from the exploding primary created a relatively opaque radiation front in the channel filler which acted like a slow-moving logjam to retard the passage of radiant energy. Behind this moving front was a fully-ionized, low-z (low atomic number) plasma heated to 20,000 degrees Celsius, soaking up energy like a black box, and eventually driving the implosion of the secondary.
       The radiation transit time, on the order of half a microsecond, is the time it takes the entire radiation channel to reach thermal equilibrium as the radiation front moves down its length. The implosion of the secondary is based on the temperature difference between the hot channel and the cool interior of the secondary. Its timing is important because the interior of the secondary is subject to neutron preheat.
       While the radiation channel is heating and starting the implosion, neutrons from the primary catch up with the x-rays, penetrate into the secondary and start breeding tritium with the third reaction noted in the first section above. This Li-6 + n reaction is exothermic, producing 5 Mev per event. The spark plug isn't yet compressed and thus isn't critical, so there won't be significant fission or fusion. But if enough neutrons arrive before implosion of the secondary is complete, the crucial temperature difference will be degraded. This is the reported cause of failure for Livermore's first thermonuclear design, the Morgenstern device, tested as Castle Koon, April 7, 1954.
       These timing issues are measured by light-pipe data. The mathematical simulations which they calibrate are called radiation flow hydrodynamics codes, or channel codes. They are used to predict the effect of future design modifications.
       It isn't clear from the public record how successful the Shrimp light pipes were. The data bunker was far enough back to remain outside the mile-wide crater, but the 15-megaton blast, two and a half times greater than expected, breached the bunker by blowing its 20-ton door off the hinges and across the inside of the bunker. (The nearest people were twenty miles farther away, in a bunker that survived intact.)

    Fallout analysis

    The most interesting data from Castle Bravo came from radio-chemical analysis of weapon debris in fallout. Because of a shortage of enriched lithium-6, 60% of the lithium in the Shrimp secondary was ordinary lithium-7, which doesn't breed tritium as easily as lithium-6 does. But it does breed lithium-6 as the product of an "n, 2n" reaction (one neutron in, two neutrons out), a known fact, but with unknown probability. The probability turned out to be high.
       Fallout analysis revealed to designers that, with the n, 2n reaction, the Shrimp secondary effectively had two and half times as much lithium-6 as expected. The tritium, the fusion yield, the neutrons, and the fission yield were all increased accordingly.
       As noted above, Bravo's fallout analysis also told the outside world, for the first time, that thermonuclear bombs are more fission devices than fusion devices. A Japanese fishing boat named the Lucky Dragon sailed home with enough fallout on its decks to allow scientists in Japan and elsewhere to determine, and announce, that most of the fallout had come from the fission of U-238 by fusion-produced 14 MeV neutrons.

    Underground testing

    The global alarm over radioactive fallout, which began with the Castle Bravo event, eventually drove nuclear testing underground. The last U.S. above-ground test took place at Johnston Island on November 4, 1962. During the next three decades, until September 23, 1992, the U.S. conducted an average of 2.4 underground nuclear explosions per month, all but a few at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) northwest of Las Vegas.
       The Yucca Flat section of the NTS is covered with subsidence craters resulting from the collapse of terrain over intensely radioactive underground caverns created by nuclear explosions (see photo).
       After the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), which limited underground explosions to 150 kilotons or less, warheads like the half-megaton W88 had to be tested at less than full yield. Since the primary must be detonated at full yield in order to generate data about the implosion of the secondary, the reduction in yield had to come from the secondary. Replacing much of the lithium-6 deuteride fusion fuel with lithium-7 hydride limited the deuterium available for fusion, and thus the overall yield, without changing the dynamics of the implosion. The functioning of the device could be evaluated using light pipes, other sensing devices, and analysis of trapped weapon debris. The full yield of the stockpiled weapon could be calculated by extrapolation.

    Production facilities

    When two-stage weapons became standard in the early 1950s, weapon design determined the layout of America's new, widely dispersed production facilities, and vice versa.
       Because primaries tend to be bulky, especially in diameter, plutonium is the fissile material of choice for pits, with beryllium reflectors. It has a smaller critical mass than uranium. The Rocky Flats plant in Boulder, Colorado, was built in 1952 for pit production and consequently became the plutonium and beryllium fabrication facility.
       The Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where mass spectrometers called Calutrons had enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project, was redesigned to make secondaries. Fissile U-235 makes the best spark plugs because its critical mass is larger, especially in the cylindrical shape of early thermonuclear secondaries. Early experiments used the two fissile materials in combination, as composite Pu-Oy pits and spark plugs, but for mass production, it was easier to let the factories specialize: plutonium pits in primaries, uranium spark plugs and pushers in secondaries.
       Y-12 made lithium-6 deuteride fusion fuel and U-238 parts, the other two ingredients of secondaries.
       The Savannah River plant in Aiken, South Carolina, also built in 1952, operated nuclear reactors which converted U-238 into Pu-239 for pits, and lithium-6 (produced at Y-12) into tritium for booster gas. Since its reactors were moderated with heavy water, deuterium oxide, it also made deuterium for booster gas and for Y-12 to use in making lithium-6 deuteride.

    Warhead design safety

  • Gun-type weapons It is inherently dangerous to have a weapon containing a quantity and shape of fissile material which can form a critical mass through a relatively simple accident. Because of this danger, the high explosives in Little Boy (four bags of Cordite powder) were inserted into the bomb in flight, shortly after takeoff on August 6, 1945. It was the first time a gun-type nuclear weapon had ever been fully assembled. Also, if the weapon falls into water, the moderating effect of the water can also cause a criticality accident, even without the weapon being physically damaged.
       Gun-type weapons have always been inherently unsafe.
  • In-flight pit insertion Neither of these effects is likely with implosion weapons since there's normally insufficient fissile material to form a critical mass without the correct detonation of the lenses. However, the earliest implosion weapons had pits so close to criticality that accidental detonation with some nuclear yield was a concern. On August 9, 1945, Fat Man was loaded onto its airplane fully assembled, but later, when levitated pits made a space between the pit and the tamper, it was feasible to utilize in-flight pit insertion. The bomber would take off with no fissile material in the bomb. Some older implosion-type weapons, such as the US Mark 4 and Mark 5, used this system.
       In-flight pit insertion won't work with a hollow pit in contact with its tamper.
  • Steel ball safety method As shown in the diagram, one method used to decrease the likelihood of accidental detonation used metal balls. The balls were emptied into the pit; this would prevent detonation by increasing density of the hollowed pit. This design was used in the Green Grass weapon, also known as the Interim Megaton Weapon and was also used in Violet Club and the Yellow Sun Mk.1 bombs.
  • Chain safety method Alternatively, the pit can be "safed" by having its normally-hollow core filled with an inert material such as a fine metal chain, possibly made of cadmium to absorb neutrons. While the chain is in the center of the pit, the pit can't be compressed into an appropriate shape to fission; when the weapon is to be armed, the chain is removed. Similarly, although a serious fire could detonate the explosives, destroying the pit and spreading plutonium to contaminate the surroundings as has happened in several weapons accidents, it couldn't however, cause a nuclear explosion.
  • Wire safety method The US W47 warhead used in Polaris A1 and Polaris A2 had a safety device consisting of a boron-coated-wire inserted into the hollow pit at manufacture. The warhead was armed by withdrawing the wire onto a spool driven by an electric motor. However, once withdrawn the wire couldn't be re-inserted.
  • One-point safety While the firing of one detonator out of many won't cause a hollow pit to go critical, especially a low-mass hollow pit that requires boosting, the introduction of two-point implosion systems made that possibility a real concern. In a two-point system, if one detonator fires, one entire hemisphere of the pit will implode as designed. The high-explosive charge surrounding the other hemisphere will explode progressively, from the equator toward the opposite pole. Ideally, this will pinch the equator and squeeze the second hemisphere away from the first, like toothpaste in a tube. By the time the explosion envelops it, its implosion will be separated both in time and space from the implosion of the first hemisphere. The resulting dumbbell shape, with each end reaching maximum density at a different time, may not become critical.
       Unfortunately, it isn't possible to tell on the drawing board how this will play out. Nor is it possible using a dummy pit of U-238 and high-speed x-ray cameras, although such tests are helpful. For final determination, a test needs to be made with real fissile material. Consequently, starting in 1957, a year after Swan, both labs began one-point safety tests.
       Out of 25 one-point safety tests conducted in 1957 and 1958, seven had zero or slight nuclear yield (success), three had high yields of 300 kt to 500 kt (severe failure), and the rest had unacceptable yields between those extremes.
       Of particular concern was Livermore's W47 warhead for the Polaris submarine missile. The last test before the 1958 moratorium was a one-point test of the W47 primary, which had an unacceptably high nuclear yield of 400 lb of TNT equivalent (Hardtack II Titania). With the test moratorium in force, there was no way to refine the design and make it inherently one-point safe. Los Alamos had a suitable primary that was one-point safe, but rather than share with Los Alamos the credit for designing the first SLBM warhead, Livermore chose to use mechanical safing on its own inherently unsafe primary. The wire safety scheme described above was the result.
       It turns out that the W47 may have been safer than anticipated. The wire-safety system may have rendered most of the warheads "duds," unable to fire when detonated.
       When testing resumed in 1961, and continued for three decades, there was sufficient time to make all warhead designs inherently one-point safe, without need for mechanical safing.
  • Permissive Action Links In addition to the above steps to reduce the probability of a nuclear detonation arrising from a single fault, locking mechanisms referred to by NATO states as Permissive Action Links are sometimes attached to the control mechanisms for nuclear warheads. Permissive Action Links act solely to prevent an unauthorised use of a nuclear weapon.Further Information

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