Atomic Bomb The Right Of The Wrong - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Could any country with the right knowledge and technology build a nuclear bomb?

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The Laboratory hired three physicists who only recently received their Ph. Ds in physics to design a nuclear bomb. Dobson, D. Pipkorn, and R. Selden had little to no experience with nuclear physics. If the scientists succeeded in designing a workable implosion device, the implications were that any country with the right technology and knowledge base could also build one. This finding would have had grave implications for American national security and nuclear Righ during the Cold War. Another reason why the postdocs wanted to design an implosion device was because they believed that a gun-type weapon that used uranium was easier for them to build and did not Atomic Bomb The Right Of The Wrong to be tested. One challenge the scientists had to overcome was plutonium capturing a neutron and turning into plutonium When plutonium fissions spontaneously, neutrons are released.

However, neutrons are important in sustaining a chain reaction or the self-sustained splitting of atoms as caused by neutrons in a nuclear weapon. The chain reaction itself is important because the splitting of atoms releases energy. That energy is what gives a nuclear weapon its yield.

If enough neutrons are released before a nuclear weapon is detonated, that weapon will fizzle, or fails to to meet expected TNT yield. As a result, a bomb that has a significant quantity of plutonium will fizzle.

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Another problem was Atmic timing of the lens detonation. An implosion device looks like a soccer ball because of the 32 lenses of explosives that surround the plutonium core. In order to produce enough energy to create a sustained chain reaction, all the lenses needed to explode at the same time. There were 32 segments surrounding that core altogether.]