I think I’m going to try and get a couple yields per se declassed.
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But I think it would have been a LOT harder in the 1960s-1970s. Both because the amount of (and access to) public domain info on this was much more limited (I have seen what it looks like when smart people have compiled it then, it's not that impressive), and
because of the computer thing. I think most people today take for granted the computational power at our fingertips but non-gov people in the 1970s could barely do 1-D models on commercial computers. We have easy access to LOTS more today, and that opens up possibilities.
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Taylor’s comments, computational design issues aside, also gloss over material & operational difficulties of actually building a bomb even assuming a physicist has 10kg of Pu metal ingots to play with. Not insurmountable but not trivial. HEU gun easier but still not ‘easy’pic.twitter.com/rL2YRn5Ffx
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Which is to say, Taylor's "designing nukes is easy!" argument, while not entirely invalid in its core concept (that with enough effort, there was enough in the public domain to make headway), was maybe ahead of its time by a few decades for people without real design experience.
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(And to qualify: "without much effort" doesn't mean "over the course of a weekend." It just means, "without dedicating the next 10 years of their life to this.")
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Also, "designing nukes [or anything] is easy" is a statement that is easier to make after you've done it for a while than when you're starting out.
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Any designing of something sufficiently complex enough is never easy. Except of you count 50 years of testing stuff in "realish" conditions and discover you did a dumb mistake in element 15456 that is 1 mm too on the left rendered the whole thing 80% less efficient count as easy
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Repeat that hundreds of thousands of time. If you think that is what easy mean then sure
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I agree, Alex. What I was expressing doubt about was the extremely small sub-kilogram masses. Something like that will always be difficult to design and execute. When Taylor designed weapons, small masses were a mark of proficiency. That design space has now been explored.
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Soviet Union tested a sub-kilogram device in 1953 http://russianforces.org/blog/2012/10/interesting_document_on_soviet.shtml …
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