Feasibility Check
Feb. 5th, 2009 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stickmakerDoes this sound reasonable for a nuclear espionage story? It doesn't have to be a scenario which would actually work this way in real life, just something which is believable for fiction:
"It's the plans for what is known as the Basement Nuke," said Sir Roger.
"What?!" said Theo, suddenly alarmed. "You mean a nuclear weapon?!"
"Back in the early Eighties a Defense Department group was tasked with evaluating the feasibility of terrorists - given enough plutonium or uranium - building a bomb in a city they wanted to destroy. They discovered two things. Even with skilled people working from standard or modified deployable weapon plans, the best they could do even with a very sophisticated machine shop was roughly eight kilotonnes. More likely the yield would be under five. However, with plans tailored to a very good machine shop - instead of a weapons lab - they could top twenty. Creating such plans would require sophisticated computer modeling, something which only major nuclear powers would have."
"So they went ahead and drew up the plans," said Theo, feeling sick.
"They had to confirm their findings. That also meant testing the two classes of devices. They had two teams, with identical starting resources and skills, do the work. One had the custom plans and the other modified deployable weapon plans. Their devices were tested - underground, of course, concealed as part of a standard weapon development series - and they functioned as expected. Then they took the custom plans from the group which had them and gave them to the other group and had them start over. This time the group which didn't have the plans actually did worse, because they were trying to rebuild the device they had the first time without the details; the result was a squib. The group with the plans built a device with the expected yield. As a safeguard, after the test was completed all copies of the plans were destroyed. Microfiche copies of the originals were made, then the originals were destroyed and the microfiche cards carefully filed away. They needed them as reference, you see, in case someone like the Soviets had the same idea."
"And somehow these plans got loose."
"Someone - for a great deal of money - pulled the microfiche cards and simply mailed them to a confederate. It was only by a stroke of luck that a random inventory check discovered the gap before the inside man could go on a planned vacation, during which his death would have been faked. He was caught. Through him the outside man was caught. Unfortunately, he had already passed the cards along. We were called in and immediately put our best covert people on the case. Skipping many details, Sandra substituted doctored plans which would have killed those working from them and got away. Unfortunately, someone twigged, and they chased after her. She was almost to her pickup point when she was ambushed. Which is where you enter the story."
"It's the plans for what is known as the Basement Nuke," said Sir Roger.
"What?!" said Theo, suddenly alarmed. "You mean a nuclear weapon?!"
"Back in the early Eighties a Defense Department group was tasked with evaluating the feasibility of terrorists - given enough plutonium or uranium - building a bomb in a city they wanted to destroy. They discovered two things. Even with skilled people working from standard or modified deployable weapon plans, the best they could do even with a very sophisticated machine shop was roughly eight kilotonnes. More likely the yield would be under five. However, with plans tailored to a very good machine shop - instead of a weapons lab - they could top twenty. Creating such plans would require sophisticated computer modeling, something which only major nuclear powers would have."
"So they went ahead and drew up the plans," said Theo, feeling sick.
"They had to confirm their findings. That also meant testing the two classes of devices. They had two teams, with identical starting resources and skills, do the work. One had the custom plans and the other modified deployable weapon plans. Their devices were tested - underground, of course, concealed as part of a standard weapon development series - and they functioned as expected. Then they took the custom plans from the group which had them and gave them to the other group and had them start over. This time the group which didn't have the plans actually did worse, because they were trying to rebuild the device they had the first time without the details; the result was a squib. The group with the plans built a device with the expected yield. As a safeguard, after the test was completed all copies of the plans were destroyed. Microfiche copies of the originals were made, then the originals were destroyed and the microfiche cards carefully filed away. They needed them as reference, you see, in case someone like the Soviets had the same idea."
"And somehow these plans got loose."
"Someone - for a great deal of money - pulled the microfiche cards and simply mailed them to a confederate. It was only by a stroke of luck that a random inventory check discovered the gap before the inside man could go on a planned vacation, during which his death would have been faked. He was caught. Through him the outside man was caught. Unfortunately, he had already passed the cards along. We were called in and immediately put our best covert people on the case. Skipping many details, Sandra substituted doctored plans which would have killed those working from them and got away. Unfortunately, someone twigged, and they chased after her. She was almost to her pickup point when she was ambushed. Which is where you enter the story."
no subject
Date: 2009-02-06 09:33 am (UTC)Analog magazine published, in their April 1979 issue, a science-fact article titled "Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood!"
The problem has always been getting the highly enriched fissionable materials, and managing to machine it to the required precision without ruining it or killing yourself.
For terrorist purposes, the Analog article is not only adequate, it produces a very *dirty* blast with lots of fallout. and it wouldn't be hard to come up with ways to make it even dirtier.
Still, detailed plans would be nice. It's the minor details that add to the yield.
ps. You probably knoew me from various places online as Brooke. :-)
no subject
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.