Thank you for point out that it’s one thing to write a paper, another to actually build the device.
Not at all, based on my reading. If the fissionable material is available, construction of the explosive device is within the capability of graduate level physicists.
Have you ever tried to make a klytron on your kitchen table?http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon12.gif
Building a nuclear device is beyond the capability of all but nations. Therefore rogue nations must be prevented from doing that.
It worked. But barely. And I mean barely.
Mutually Assured Destruction is a good idea, but we shouldn’t take the impossibility of nuclear war for granted – and the more cavalier we get about their use, the more likely it becomes.
You don’t need a nation to build nuclear weapons. My grand-dad designed nuclear weapons for the government off and on during his 31 years with Union Carbide at Oak Ridge, TN. He told me that at one point in the late seventies (a few years before he retired), that they pulled together a few engineers that had built hydrogen bombs during the 50’s (my granddad one of them) plus some new engineers and asked them to make a nuke with the minimal amount of equipment. With their knowledge, just a handful built a nuke with the same if not less equipment that what the Univ. of Tenn. had in their engineering labs. The only material/equipment they used that couldn’t be found at such a lab was the fissible material.
We have a saying in the Infantry, “If it’sstupid and it works, it isn’t stupid.”
I know very well who MacNamara was – I went through the whole Viet Nam war.
We neither take it for granted, nor do we consider nuclear war an impossibility.
Around 1964, I was the weapons platoon leader of a mechanized infantry battalion. Among the weapons I had were two Davy Crocketts – recoilless rifles that fired a bulbous tactical nuclear warhead.
Pardon me if I don’t consider that a definitive cite.
So you’re calling my granddad a liar?
So far. And it has come within a hair’s breadth of failure on many occasions, the Cuban Missile Crisis being only the most famous. We’ve nearly had World War III because of geese on a radar screen.
To MacNamara’s credit, he’s pretty open about his mistakes and failures in “The Fog of War.” The whole thing starts with him saying, “Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he’s speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people unnecessarily — his own troops or other troops — through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand.”
But don’t you think the Cold War formulation might be outdated in a world where rather than fairly monolithic nuclear superpowers in opposition to each other, nuclear weapons are slowly dribbling out of the USSR and into the hands of individuals rather than nation-states? MAD is one thing when you’re dealing with rational leaders of an opposing nation. It’s something else when you’re dealing with an unknown number of bombs in the hands of an unknown number of unknown individuals who may be quite willing to destroy themselves to destroy us.
I honestly wasn’t aware that tac-nukes went back that far; thanks for teaching me something new.
BTW, I don’t think you can consider nuclear engineers, who are employed by the government and asked to do a task for the government, as private citizens building a nuke for fun.
They had a variantion to the yield, equivalant in the range of 10 to 250 tons of TNT. The blast range was between 150 meters and 500 meters.
Your granddad didn’t post on this thread, now did he?http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon12.gif
You mean your granddad didn’t tell you?http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon12.gif
That would be kinda hard since he died in March.
Yeah, sure, whatever you say. I guess you’ll tell us next that at some point in your career in the military you designed nuclear weapons.
You have to admit it’s not a very believeable story.
Neither is half the stuff you type, but you don’t see me making accusations. I have to admit, I’d take the word of a nuclear engineer (family or not) who designed the things all through the 50’s and off & on during the 60’s and 70’s, over someone who’s invlovement w/ them involved deploying 2 tactical nukes on a platoon level.
I think most people would say that “My granddad said such-and-such” isn’t a genuine cite. Not to be unkind, but grand children often get granddad’s stories confused.
Well I guess some of your third person stories don’t count as cites either, but to hear you tell it it’s the Gospel truth and no one on these forums should question it. I’m sure you’ve gotten some of your stories mixed up, like when Col. so and so said this and General so and so said that.
Why don’t you share some of your stories?
Haven’t ever heard you say that, but I knew you would say something like that. So why don’t you call them up sometime and ask them about my granddad. PM me and I’ll give you his last name and when he worked at Oak Ridge. Don’t worry, the last name isn’t very common.
Pardon me, but you seemed determined to turn this into something personal.
I haven’t tried to make it personal. I’m just pointing out how you always seem to know sooo much more than everyone else and try to make yourself look like an expert on every subject. Then, on this thread, you’ve all but called me a liar because I recalled a story told to me by my grandfather, who I will add never spoke about his work as an engineer until the last 9 or 10 years before he died. There are somethings I’m sure he took to his grave that he couldn’t ever talk about. All you did was provide me the right time to finally point it out.
