I've been looking over some Trinity-related literature at the moment. A few things that popped out to me this time that I hadn't remembered reading.
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Today is the 74th anniversary of the first atomic bomb detonation, "Trinity." Here's my New Yorker piece on the test from a few years back.https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-first-light-of-the-trinity-atomic-test …
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New Mexico was actually #2 on Groves' list of preferred test sites. #1 was in California. Groves went with #2 after he learned that to get permission to test in #1, he'd need to go through Gen. Patton, and Groves loathed Patton, "the most disagreeable man I had ever met."
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George Kistiakowsky, the top scientist for high explosives, chose to leave for the test site just after midnight on Friday the 13th, because he "believed in unorthodox luck."
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Scientist Philip Morrison later said that the "scariest thing" about the test experience was "the fast driving young woman who drove us down there with the convoy, who was a high-speed, pedal to the floor the whole way."
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Groves and Oppenheimer had to watch the test from different shelters, separated a bit, so that if one of them died, the other could keep managing the project.
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Groves stationed 20 government agents in nearby towns not just to monitor for safety issues, but to counter any damage claims that people nearby might later attribute to the blast and ask for compensation from.
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The Army deliberately did not pursue the question of fallout exposure from the test too diligently, because they feared lawsuits.pic.twitter.com/RBkcxhbmm7
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All of the above come from the CDC's Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment Report, vol. 5 (2007), appendix N. https://wwwn.cdc.gov/LAHDRA/
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My favorite quote on Trinity remains test director Kenneth Bainbridge's: "Now we are all sons of bitches."http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/07/17/now-we-are-all-sons-of-bitches/ …
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Ever see a piece of the actual "glass" the sand at the site became? I have in chemistry class.
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I have a few pieces that
@NuclearAnthro kindly gifted me! -
Still slightly radioactive as of 1979 - Geiger counter.
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Noter que la bombe qui a rasé Hiroshima, plus simple de conception, n'a pas été validée par un test avant son utilisation opérationnelle.
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It had much simpler gun-like design and massnof it's uranium core was much greater than it was required. So everything was guaranteed. Plutonium A-bomb could be only implosion-based, and such unorthodox design required extra test to be sure.
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Yes. People often think the 2 bombs were the same… Is there operationnal weapon with gun design ?
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A few Little Boy bombs were stockpiled in the immediate postwar, but after that the design was only used for nuclear artillery, where the diameter of the weapon was very important. I don't know about other countries. South Africa's small stockpile were supposedly gun-designs.
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Acoording to me, Gun-Type design stimll have a big advantage. It's the most relable, durable and "free" support design (even a netron initiator is not need). A Country who want ta have an "eternal" dterence (like mine, France) should keep some in the stockpile.
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I am afraid that you cannot use gun design device as a primary in thermonuclear weapon, so the yield you can have this way is quite limited. Also it allows to use uranium, not plutonium, and most of core will be wasted. It looks to me as bad set of qualities for a French nuke.
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The idea isn't to use it as primary or to substitue modern warhead (France has thermoNuke since long time). The idea is to have a retalation even if the rest of the force and most support in the country is kaput . The yield in the 20kt range is enought to have a real deterence.
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I am not sure that such a mosquito bites are sufficient for a real countervalue deterence. Frankly speaking I believe that even biological warfare is more perspective deterence tool. Also it seems that psychological aspect of nuclear deterence is deteriorating in modern days.
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