Thanks to LLMs I am querying books I really shouldn’t.
There is a book called en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitlers_… in German language which describes an debunked way Nazis made a fission bomb (mainstream history says Nazis couldn’t make the nuclear bomb), without having enough enriched material to work with. Nazis used a unconventional design of using a fusion reaction to create enough neutrons to do fission in a less enriched material. It is thoroughly debunked. Using fission to start fusion is well known. But using fusion to start fission first stage is not considered possible AFAIK CMIIW
So it got me reading about shaped charges, explosive lenses etc. and there is a thing called en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voitenko… invented by a Ukrainian engineer in the 1960s. It is the only chemical way to generate a nuclear fusion reaction. It sounds remarkably like what the above book says Nazis used, but the author of the book doesn’t know about Voitenko.
TL;DR It might be possible to make a nuclear weapon without using weapons grade fissile material. Just slightly enriched fissile material is enough.
LandedGentry
in reply to technocrit • • •aklsdfjaksl;dfjkl;asdf
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