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chasil • today at 2:27 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

The plutonium bomb was vastly more difficult to design than the uranium version.

Were both judged infeasible for different reasons? Perhaps uranium purification challenges and the implosion required for plutonium?


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defrost • today at 2:45 AM

In general the take was that human created nuclear weapons were infeasible (regardless of design) because of what was thought to be the barrier to cross to achieve a chain reaction.

The Frisch–Peierls memorandum changed that understanding ... provided that reading of the FP-memorandum was convincingly conveyed to people that made things happen, what Einstein put to paper (and was ignored) and that Oliphant pushed through in person.

Little Boy on Hiroshima was a gun design, a grossly inefficient McGyver that used some 64 kilograms of enriched uranium to successfully convert less than half a gram to energy.

Fat Man on Nagasaki was an implosion device - a necessary design change due to simply not having enough uranium or an enrichment pipeline to sustain the needs of a gun design.

The first device detonated, at Trinity in the USofA, was an implosion device, created to test the more difficult design.

Further, there was an abandoned / discarded "Thin Man" device IIRC.

These were all alternative implementations that were pursued after the FP-memorandum was pushed about to make the case that weapons were apparently possible rather than not yet achievable - the prevailing belief in the US prior to Oliphant doing the rounds.

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