Alex WellersteinVerified account

Given the ongoing effort to develop new, low-yield warheads, that could be useful and timely. Unfortunately, I can see DOD and DOE using that fact to justify continuing to keep them secret.

Did Ted Taylor have a hand in the W54, & do you think its design influenced the design of Project Orion propellant charges? Don't recall any mention in George Dyson's book. I think Taylor joined the project in 1958.

I tend to take physicists talking in public like this with a grain of salt.

I met Ted in the 1980s. He was very down-to-earth. Talk like this was a warning about the dangers of the technology based on his direct experience (and subsequent conversion away from building bombs, even if he found the work "sweet"), not boasting or hyperbole.

Perhaps. But physicists are often very full of themselves and, if they feel they have a cause, can exaggerate.

Taylor’s comments about non-state actor construction of nukes come to mind as being potentially hyperbolic. Or, as someone else put it: it may be trivial to him but we’re not all Ted Taylor.

I tend to feel that a physicist with an interest in this today, and access to fairly typical computing power, could without much effort design an implosion device that they'd have reasonable confidence in working based on open source info.