Off-topic but implosion is a means of assembly which isn't specific to a
particular kind of fissionable material. Gun assembly would also work
equally well with plutonium if not for its high spontaneous fission rate
increasing the chance of pre-detonation due to the relatively slow speed of
assembly. Also weapons can and have been made using a combination of
multiple fissionable materials (composite cores) which I believe can have
advantages.
On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 10:37 AM, John Dom <johndom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Henry Spencer wrote on 130218:
...Mass-spectrometer enrichment looked much more simple and certain, justdifficult to scale up to the level needed, so it got pursued too
(eventually
assisted by thermal diffusion), and it produced the first uranium bomb
cores. And in fact most of the early bomb cores came from water-cooled
graphite reactors producing plutonium, even though that required a lot of
work to develop implosion bombs (much trickier, much less well understood
at
the start)...
Oak Ridge works.
Odd the first fission bomb (Alamogordo desert) was a "tricky" cast
plutonium
implosion device. Not the simple uranium gun option: that was unleashed
above Hiroshima.
I have references of several of nuke test lists but does anyone have a
test-named list detailing uranium or plutonium was used?
Browsing I further read to my surprise uranium can be cast just like
plutonium into a sperical geometry for implosion devices.
John