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I think you are agreeing with me. Regarding the expensive part. The actual word in the book ([1], p 174) was "difficult", not expensive, I misremembered. > The United States Corps of Engineers at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory, consisting of 1,500 scientists, engineering specialists, and precision machinists, solved the problem of spherical shock-wave propagation in 1945 in the Manhattan Project. It was the most difficult task in the entire project, in which highly abstract theoretical physics was turned into a weaponized device. It took twenty thousand test explosions to perfect the technique, and for every test explosion there were probably twenty experimental configurations that were found to be not worth testing.
I am not disputing that implosion is much more efficient than the gun type. Even the Nagasaki bomb had a much higher efficiency than the Hiroshima bomb. In the Hiroshima bomb only 1.4% of the uranium underwent fission. In the Nagasaki bomb, 17% of the plutonium did that, plus an astounding 4% of the unenriched uranium temper.However, imagine von Neumann did not get involved in the project. There's a good chance it would have taken the team a few more months to solve the implosion puzzle. If such had been the case, Groves and Oppenheimer would have pulled the plug, and focused fully on the uranium design. Now, fast forward a few more months until the end of WW2, when Oppenheimer and the vast majority of the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos had gone home. Norris Bradburry is the new boss. The US Navy comes and tells him they want to set up Operation Crossroads in the Pacific, in mid 1946, and he needs to provide 3 atomic bombs for that, and maybe a spare or two. What would he do? Tell them that he needs some extra time to work on some potential great alternative design, or reply "Yes, Sir" and go ahead and make, with whatever handful of scientists and engineers he had left, a few replicas of the Little Boy? My guess is that he would have chosen the second option. In such a scenario, when the Soviets build their own atomic bomb, it is also a gun-type, because that's the working design they steal. It is perfectly reasonable that the US sees implosion as a game changer (as it was) and perfect the design after the war, but the urgency is down by a factor of 10, as is the scientific manpower. A large number of scientists refused to work on atomic weapons after the end of WW2, now aware of their monstrous effects. And here we both agree that it's quite plausible that the arms race would between the US and the Soviet Union would have been less intense. It would have taken a few extra years to get to the Ivy King level of technology, and by that point the ICBM precision would have been high enough that radiation implosion thermonuclear weapons would not have been really needed. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Atomic_Adventures/wxokD... |