Perhaps. But physicists are often very full of themselves and, if they feel they have a cause, can exaggerate.
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Replying to @CherylRofer @AtomicAnalyst and
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.
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Replying to @NuclearAnthro @CherylRofer and
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.
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Replying to @wellerstein @NuclearAnthro and
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
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Replying to @wellerstein @NuclearAnthro 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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Replying to @wellerstein @CherylRofer and
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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Replying to @NuclearAnthro @wellerstein and
Y’all know difficulties encountered by Manhattan better than I do in terms of shaping materials, explosive engineering, achieving necessary timing standards for firing, etc. There’s also presumably gonna be an interplay b/t theoretical computer design & physical enactment.pic.twitter.com/t3luLsgHTO
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Replying to @NuclearAnthro @CherylRofer and
I was talking only about developing plausible *design.* Fabrication would take a team of people with different experiences. But I don't think it's implausible if you're talking about a terrorist-grade weapon — low yield, high uncertainty — and the right team.
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Replying to @wellerstein @NuclearAnthro and
That was certainly the conclusion of Peter Zimmerman and
@ArmsControlWonk in their 2009@ForeignPolicy cover story:https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/16/the-bomb-in-the-backyard/ …2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @AtomicAnalyst @wellerstein and
19 specialists willing to work together for "the cause".
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Replying to @CherylRofer @AtomicAnalyst and
It's not totally unheard of... Aum Shinrikyo, and even al-Qaeda, had surprising amounts of technical expertise at their disposal.https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-03-10/uncivil-engineers …
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