Only it turned out there's more to it than covered in that article. (I suspect the author was deliberately simplifying.) To get 15+ kt in a gun design requires some features difficult to do with even a sophisticated workshop. Some of those have only recently been uncovered.
I just got a copy of _Atomic Bombs_ by John Coster-Mullen, available from Amazon. Stuff in this is what suggested the storyline.
I had read previously about the computational work done for the Manhattan Project. Turns out that's _very_ important, and the pure mathematicians were as vital as the theorists and experimentalists.
Remember that even North Korea is having trouble, their test from a couple of years back producing a much lower than expected yield.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-02-06 02:29 pm (UTC)Only it turned out there's more to it than covered in that article. (I suspect the author was deliberately simplifying.) To get 15+ kt in a gun design requires some features difficult to do with even a sophisticated workshop. Some of those have only recently been uncovered.
I just got a copy of _Atomic Bombs_ by John Coster-Mullen, available from Amazon. Stuff in this is what suggested the storyline.
I had read previously about the computational work done for the Manhattan Project. Turns out that's _very_ important, and the pure mathematicians were as vital as the theorists and experimentalists.
Remember that even North Korea is having trouble, their test from a couple of years back producing a much lower than expected yield.