Re: 100 megaton bombs atop Saturn V rockets

From: Peter Fairbrother (zenadsl6186_at_zen.co.uk)
Date: 07/20/04 

Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 19:55:59 +0100

Some speculation on very high yield, very high YTW bombs:

Personally, I doubt that mostly-fusion bombs have been designed or shot with
a ytw of over 4 kT/Kg. I think the "declassifed facts", and the theories and
statements about Dominic Pamlico, are are too ambiguous to base such a large
conclusion on. I think that the 6 kT/Kg acheived in multi-stage
fission-fusion-fission bombs is about the limit for practical bombs.

Here are a few thoughts on some impractical bombs:

I do believe that mostly-fission bombs, using the original Ulam principle
(using a nuclear explosion to compress a fission core, not a fusion core)
with a slow-fissile case, using fusion only as a source of extra neutrons,
could achieve around 50% fission burn, or 8 Kt/Kg - the bomb is almost all
fissionable material - but such bombs would be very expensive in terms of
fissionable material used.

I hadn't heard about the re-appraisal of the Teller "super" before, so
perhaps this could be redesigned a bit, maybe leaving out the first stage
precompression:

There is another mechanism I can think of, that might work - surround
deuterium fusion fuel with a pusher made out of fissionable material.
Precompress the whole with a first stage, just to get it smaller. Ablation
pressure from a secondary stage then compresses the pusher many times more,
the pusher becomes critical and fissions, and the compressed fusion fuel is
then surrounded by fissioning material. The pusher should all fission at the
same time.

The pressure of the fusioning deuterium would have to be quite high, to
equal the fissioning pusher, before disasasembly even began, giving high
burn. Pusher burn should be near-complete too from fusion neutrons. More
importantly, this should allow a greater fusion fuel:pusher ratio, and thus
more fusion fuel in the bomb overall. Again this is very expensive, but not
as expensive as the first method, and it might exceed 10 kT/Kg.

You could probably get > 6 kT/Kg from a D-T bomb too, but the cost of the
tritium would be ruinous! 

-- 
Peter Fairbrother

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