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by Animats 1640 days ago
Well, not really. The atomic bomb didn't really require quantum mechanics to build. Certainly not the gun bomb. That's two hunks of enriched uranium forced together. Implosion was tougher, but mostly a hydrodynamics problem. H-bombs required much more theory.
2 comments
IAmYourDensity 1640 days ago
Yes, you probably don't need QM to design a gun bomb, but to build one you do need 64kg of enriched U-235 and for that you need a Manhattan Project and for that you need Einstein to write a letter to the President and for that you need Bohr & Wheeler to write "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission" in 1939 and confidently explain that it could work and for that you need QM.
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daniel-cussen 1640 days ago
And they could only produce a single gun bomb. The other one had to be Plutonium, meaning it had to have a neutron trigger, IIRC that involved Bohr. It took two bombs to end the war.
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