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GeekNights Monday - Nuclear Weapons

Tonight on GeekNights, in light of the recent (likely boosted fission) nuclear test by North Korea, we talk about the mechanics, science, and engineering around nuclear weapons. In the news, there are solid rumors of a small iPhone 6c or 7c, the loss of TRS jacks from the iPhone 7 seems all but certain, and your Nvidia video card is keeping your incognito tabs around.

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  • I think I read that the HIroshima and/or Nagasaki bomb was triggered by an altimeter, because they didn't want to make a crater. I don't have a source though.
  • Ikatono said:

    I think I read that the HIroshima and/or Nagasaki bomb was triggered by an altimeter, because they didn't want to make a crater. I don't have a source though.

    Half correct - they had altitude detonators, but it wasn't because they didn't want to leave a crater. It's because their calculations showed that an airburst weapon would have the greatest destructive effect.
  • CHiPs...

    I can't be the only person who read Toyfare magazine back in the 90's, right?
  • USB C can make two of its pins stereo audio. I've heard the new version of Lightning (already in the iPad Pro) doesn't just mirror the connections on either side of the connector (with the 8 contacts either side plus ground) but keeps them distinct (16 contacts with individual strands inside the cable). And that the new version will be able to use two pins as analogue audio out.

    That means the next version of lightning headphones won't need a built in DAC, that will still be inside the phone. The lighting connector on the end of the headphone cable could be as dumb as TRRS.

    Also: I also can usually get through a day on one iPhone charge, but not when traveling. For this next trip I've bought myself a Smart Battery Case. I tested it out for a while and I really, really love it. I have an external battery pack already, but I have to think about it, and carry separately, and charge it separately, and all that stuff. The Smart Battery Case is truly smart, in ways that other cases and packs just don't manage.

    It also works much better with the lens kit I have for my iphone too, which is a handy bonus.
  • That means the next version of lightning headphones won't need a built in DAC, that will still be inside the phone. The lighting connector on the end of the headphone cable could be as dumb as TRRS.

    That's good news if true!

    Also: I also can usually get through a day on one iPhone charge, but not when traveling. For this next trip I've bought myself a Smart Battery Case. I tested it out for a while and I really, really love it. I have an external battery pack already, but I have to think about it, and carry separately, and charge it separately, and all that stuff. The Smart Battery Case is truly smart, in ways that other cases and packs just don't manage.

    Those advantages of the battery case are real, but I'm willing to have a separate battery pack because I can't stand making my phone even bigger.
  • It doesn't have to be bigger all the time, though, and that's what I like about it. For my upcoming 19 hours of flying to my next gig (starting tomorrow), it means I an put it in the slightly bigger case and forget about it.

    Once on the cruise ship, I'll use my normal case.

    Then when I'm out and about in a city for a full day, using internet, fitness tracking, playing audio, recording videos, chatting, calling, etc, I can use the smart case again. Normally when traveling I have to take the external battery pack and a cable... and then sometimes not even nee to use it. The smart case is a use-and-forget thing, but if I want the lighter smaller phone, I still have that option (not if the bigger battery was built in like the 6plus).

    Still, it's a new thing, so maybe it won't work out in the long run. But from my testing over the last two weeks, I think it's a big step in the right direction.
  • In terms of tech, what I'm curious about now is, are there telltale signs of a nation developing a thermonuclear device? There's certain tells that someone is trying to develop enriched uranium and all that, but once you have that part, is there anything particularly exotic about a thermonuclear weapon program that would be obvious to outside observers?

    I presume the answers to this are as secret as the tech, so no answer is likely. But I'm still curious.

    I also wonder if the development of the modern thermonuclear bomb is responsible for other advances in tech. Obviously delivery systems for them led to the space race which led to many advances. But I would believe you if you said modern ultra precision cnc manufacturing, or computer chip fabrication or some other sort of ultra tight tolerance work was a direct result of the tech required to build the bomb. But maybe not the case.

    As it is, North Korea doesn't need full blown fusion bombs to be effective. If they had even nothing but stockpiles of gun-type bombs it would be enough to start a massively bad time. Having boosted fission weapons is a not good thing on top of that, because those can easily do enough damage that it could effectively end south Korea or parts of Japan, with a stockpile that they can probably actually manage.

    And what would the response be? Conventional forces that might also be nuked? Conventional bomber strikes that may or may not do anything significant to their program? Counter nukes?

    I'm not particularly worried that NK's leadership is actually dumb enough to go on a murder suicide run with nuclear weapons. But I imagine there must be some level of contingency on all sides.
  • First of all, you have to make sure that not even one person working on your project rats you out. You have to make sure that spies, spy planes, and satellites don't see you moving radioactive materials around. Avoiding all the mundane ways of being foiled is already ridiculously difficult, but it's not impossible.

    What is impossible is testing them without anyone noticing. If you don't test them, how do you know what you've made will actually work and won't just be a useless lump of Plutonium? If you test them, the explosion is so big that everyone on earth who is paying attention will know you set one off.

    If you do it above ground, everyone can see it with their eyeballs. If you do it in space, it can also be seen. If you do it under the sea, it will still be seen. That's a lot of dead fishies. You have to do it under the earth.

    Ok, so now every country that is paying attention sees you did it on their seismographs. They know exactly where you did it because they share data and triangulate. What are you going to do? Say it was an earthquake? It looks a lot different than an earthquake on the seismograph. Experts can tell. Are you really going to set it off near a fault line in your own country to make it more believable? How are you going to hide the radiation that everyone can detect? Even if you could, are you going to test just once? Nobody will believe in more than one earthquake.

    To test them without anyone knowing, you would need:

    a) A secret base in space somewhere that nobody on earth could detect what you are doing.

    b) A container on earth so ridiculously strong that you can test devices in it. The container would need sensors and other equipment inside of it that could detect the fact that the device worked, or didn't work. The container would have to be strong enough to contain the explosion, absorb the shock so that it doesn't shake the earth, and contain the radiation enough that nobody else could detect it. Obviously, this is even more impossible than hiding it.

    c) A vast conspiracy involving all the people on earth who are monitoring to keep their mouths shut.

    d) Make your first test a live test on your enemies. Good luck!
  • SWATrous said:

    In terms of tech, what I'm curious about now is, are there telltale signs of a nation developing a thermonuclear device?

    Certain isotopes escaping into the air after testing. Certain kinds of facilities manufacturing certain kinds of exotic materials (like aerogels). Any successful test (the yield is ENORMOUS).

    There is a strong argument that the testing performed by the US and Russia is the sole reason the engineering challenge was solved. It is likely impossible for any nation to develop a thermonuke without similar testing. It is a credit to the world that we agreed to just fucking stop testing everywhere forever and (except for India, Pakistan, South Africa, Israel, and North Korea) abided by that decision.

    India's weapon was a simple show of force. Pakistan's weapons program appears to be the primary source of the material and intelligence for other countries' attempts (like Iran and NK). Neither was more than a simple mass criticality weapon.
  • The US maintained (and grew) and large stockpile of boosted-fission weapons even after we had developed thermonuclear devices. We could manufacture them surprisingly quickly, and arm fleets of bombers with thousands of the things. Our strategy in the last 50s was basically to mass-bomb in Europe/Russia, much like the carpet bombing of World War II, but with fission-boosted weapons.

    The thermonukes were only really in play when SLBMs and ICBMs became feasible, at least initially.
  • Does anyone wish we could take the stockpiles built up to space and just nuke the everliving fuck out of some asteroids or something? That's the one thing where having these weapons may prove useful: pushing around big space rocks... and so testing the theory and deployment might be a good use for the material so-far assembled and yet most importantly put modern context on what a nuke is.

    I would also be up for having a pre-arranged detonation of a nuke in a designated zone every year or every ten or whatever, mostly to keep people aware of what these are, and occasionally provide a chance to experiment with blasts of that magnitude for science reasons.

    All the nuke tests went on a while ago now. We could collect some serious data and awesome photos with modern detonation while also reminding people thst these bombs are huge deals. I imagine that in 50 years almost no one alive will have first hand experience with such explosions and that might lead to people forgetting why we stopped. As Rym mentions the generals saw Castle Bravo and realized these things were fucked up. Will our children just take our grandparent's word for it?
  • Nuclear tests create catastrophic radiation pollution. We should never test them in atmosphere again.

    Frankly, I believe we shouldn't test them at all primarily because the less data there is available, the less likely it is that anyone will ever independently derive them again.

    We have plenty of photos. We also have the still-living memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    The argument that if we don't have constant reminders through use, we'll forget, doesn't really hold water. Genocide has continued in many places after World War 2, and yet there are STILL people who deny that it ever happened.
  • SWATrous said:

    pushing around big space rocks...

    Something like this has been proposed: Project Orion. You literally set off nukes behind your spaceship and let it blast you the way you want to go.
  • Also, I bet there is some GREAT Scott physics in this episode :) docbrown.jpg
  • Well, we didn't get too deep into the weeds. I tried not to reference specific isotopes or stuff like that. Like, I didn't get into why the gun-type weapons couldn't really use plutonium.
  • Something like orion is what was being used in the novel Aurora to drive and then decelerate their colony ship to Tau Ceti.

    The whole book is an argument against the notion that such trips are a sound, practical, or even humane idea... but the orion drive tech is not a concern anyone takes up. This ship having a huge supply of tiny thermonuclear bombs is just as much a potential problem as if it had stores of traditional fuel and it's automated so no one has to think about it much.

    I don't know if the sealing Pandora box method is going to work long term either. Barring someone who has clearance turning sides and divulging design details: is it not hypothetically possible that any determined group with the computer tech of today and especially that of 2060 could simulate the physics enough to develop a bomb without going off of 100 year old plans?

    Of course we always have the data from the early bombs and even the most basic reporting was enough for independent scientists to calculate yields and assume construction methods with simple math so I get that new detonation even if used in soace-based big blast projects might yield useful data for badguy bomb dev.

    It still results in what keeps getting brought up: these devices aren't subtle to build or test even with full blueprints. Without strong technical background and resources advanced nukes are next to impossible to build. I'm sure plans for the ulam teller and other such devices have already leaked to people who would like to make one, but know they can't because they aren't a global superpower.

    Outside of Orion drives, and some kind of last resort asteroid shover, are there any potential future applications for nuclear devices sans a weapon?
  • Are you serious? Nuclear power.
  • Starfox said:

    Are you serious? Nuclear power.

    The technology that facilitates thermonuclear weapons has no real use in nuclear power research.
  • SWATrous said:

    Outside of Orion drives, and some kind of last resort asteroid shover, are there any potential future applications for nuclear devices sans a weapon?

    What practical application is there for releasing a very large amount of energy in a very short amount of time? Not much for low energy beings like us hoomans. It would be very efficient for robot overlords who don't GAF about radiation to clean life off of earth. We already know it's useless against an Independence Day style alien invasion. I joked about it on the show, but it's useless even for things like mining.

    Maybe if we had to adjust the Earth's Orbit to push ourselves further away from an expanding sun?
  • Ok, maybe "nuclear devices" implied compact, explosion type items, rather than just nuclear energy. That's the way I read it.
  • Rym said:

    Frankly, I believe we shouldn't test them at all primarily because the less data there is available, the less likely it is that anyone will ever independently derive them again.

    image
    Valuse
  • Starfox said:

    Ok, maybe "nuclear devices" implied compact, explosion type items, rather than just nuclear energy. That's the way I read it.

    The secret of thermonuclear weapon engineering is the ability to channel X-Rays in such a way as to directly (or via an aerogel becoming plasma) compress a fusion device.

    There is no practical purpose to that technology other than the initiation of uncontrolled fusion reactions designed to in turn trigger further uncontrolled fission reactions.

    Are you thinking of small "nuclear power" devices? Because they have little practical use outside of certain space and marine applications due to their high weight and relatively low power output. They're grossly inefficient, and also have no real relation to nuclear weapons.

  • Yeah I certainly am excluding non supercritical power from this. I was within 20 ft of a nuclear reactor just the other day in fact... so I'm aware they exist.
  • Rym, I think we're talking past each other. I'm going with two basic classes of nuclear energy applications: explodey things (roughly "bombs") and not-explodey things (roughly power plants).

    I gave non-explodey things as an example of useful nuclear energy, but Swat had excluded those from his question.

    Anyway, still not sure of a useful explodey device. One problem is that they put out a ton of unfocused energy. Suppose you had a conventional warhead that big. What could you use it for, besides bombing?

    Maybe slam a ton into Venus to terraform it via cooling.
  • If you want to test your thermonuclear weapon in Whitesboro, NY, I won't complain. Just make sure the wind is blowing North when you do, so I don't get radiated down here in the city.

    http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/new-york-village-votes-to-keep-logo-that-shows-man-choking-native-american-1.2733381
  • So how long till this?
  • This game is at every single tabletop library I have ever seen at a convention or game store, no matter how big or small. I've never played it.

    https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/713/nuclear-war
  • Apreche said:

    This game is at every single tabletop library I have ever seen at a convention or game store, no matter how big or small. I've never played it.

    https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/713/nuclear-war

    I've meet the creator of that game. He makes box bands that I use for my board game. That game was munchkin before munchkin existed, not worthy of play unless you like silly next to nuclear war.
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