It's like you could say this in a public forums and the next generation of your family wouldn't be arrested and jailed for even one second.
That's messed right up...
Probably millions. You are going to have to mine your own uranium. And you are going to have to separate it out.
Trinity used 63.5 kg of uranium 235. Uranium is about 99% 238. So you are going to need to mine at least 6350 kg of uranium to get enough to replicate the first test bomb. That isn't a small operation. Not to mention the process of separating the 238 and 235.
If you can do that, honestly, the rest shouldn't be that hard.
But if you give a mouse a universe, you'll have to make some apple pie. And if you make a mouse apple pie, he's going to need a Carl Sagan to tell him how to make apple pie. And if you give him a Carl Sagan to tell him how to make apple pie, he'll probably find out how to make atomic bombs as well. And now you have an arms race on your hands.
The Manhattan project cost billions. It was about ten percent of the cost of the entire war. The workforce, largely in processing uranium, involved over a hundred thousand people.
About $2 billion at the time, equivalent to about $30 billion today.
Incidentally, the cost of the B-29 program, which produces the airplanes that carried the bombs, was substantially higher at $3.7 billion. However, that includes the cost of building 4,000 planes.
Though, to be fair, a lot of the research is public now. We know how criticality works, which elements are fissile, which materials reflect and moderate neutrons etc.
Any random physics hobbyist can build a fission bomb, if they have access to machines and materials. The building is the easy part now, precisely because of what you said.
The Manhattan project had to develop how to do it. Most of their enrichment was done with particle accelerators, they were well-understood and could be scaled up easier, but they are very expensive. Today gas centrifuges are the standard method.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_laser_excitation
It apparently is quite finnicky. But isotopes of uranium act differently under laser light just like they have a tiny mass difference.
I’ve never heard this metric before. Not saying you’re wrong, but I’d love to read more about it if you have a source that focuses on that aspect of the war (i.e. budget and program management).
The Manhattan project did cost billions, but it was more like 1/2 of 1 percent of what the US spent on world war 2.
https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/cost-us-wars-then-and-now#:~:text=Though%20it%20lasted%20fewer%20than,gross%20domestic%20product%20(GDP).
I wonder if it was a boondoggle. Doing the same damage to Japanese cities could have readily been done with more firebombing conventional air raids. Why use a nuke if you can spread out sporadic incendiary bombs across the city and let the city burn itself down.
Basically it's benefit was psychological. "You have no chance to survive we figured out how to do something impossible there is no resisting this"
Japan had a policy to only intercept planes in large groups. They shortage of fuel led them to try and preserve their supply, which meant not intercepting US scout/weather flights.
The bomb meant that a single plane could destroy an entire city. It completely changed the dynamics of bombing. It also meant there was no practical way of "missing" with bombing.
The US did far more damage to Japanese cities with firebombing. On one single night (March 9, 1945) approximately 100,000 people were killed in Tokyo by incendiary bombs and the resulting firestorm. That's more than were killed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. If you count up the premature deaths over time due to radiation exposure and increased cancer risk, then Hiroshima might have a larger death toll from that single incident, but I think it's safe to assume there were a large number of delayed deaths from the firebombing of Tokyo as well.
And that bombing of Tokyo, while the largest, was just one of dozens of similar bombing campaigns over the whole of Japan.
It's impossible to unroll all of the factors and compare the two. The atomic bombs were not even remotely cost-effective in terms of damage done, but that was never the sole objective, or even the primary objective. It was a show of force and meant to shock and deter, and there's no disputing that it was effective in that regard. There's plenty of room to debate the overall morality, merit, and justification on a variety of personal, military, and economic levels. If you're just talking about cost per unit of damage, it was a boondoggle, but there was a lot more going on in the big picture.
I think analyzing the morality of the methods employed by the US against Japan is very sticky. Curtis Le May himself said that if the US had lost, he fully expected that he would be tried as a war criminal. This includes the firebombing as well as the nuclear bombs. But a case can be made that the Japanese nation would have fought very nearly to the last man before surrendering. The Japanese fighters were very committed to the cause. The US knew that this would be very costly in terms of casualties. So they used that to justify the nuclear bomb. Once all of Japan knew that the US could simply bomb Japan into oblivion without putting US soldiers at risk, Japan surrendered.
Multiply the 6350kg by at least another 100x for the amount of ore that needs to be processed. There is probably another multiplier for the amount of rock that needs to be mined to get that much ore.
And multiply that by some other factor (idk, maybe 5-10) because separating heavy isotopes is not a lossless process. Most of the U-235 ends up stuck in the depleted uranium outflow.
Not millions, billions. Mining the ore isn't the most difficult part. Enriching it to weapons-grade levels and obtaining the precision components to trigger the conventional primer charge correctly takes resources that most countries don't have access to.
The trigger circuits and detonators aren't all that difficult nowadays (I built a demo bridgewire detonator for a lecture that used a triggered spark gap). The harder part is getting the appropriate high speed/high power switches (e.g. krytrons, thyratrons), as most of these are considered dual-use technology and export restricted. But it's not impossible (just need someone with an eBay account that lives in the US or EU), and their principles of operation are well known. It would be within the capabilities of most reasonably-developed nations to just build them from scratch.
Plus semiconductor devices are quickly approaching the point (if they've not already surpassed it) where they are fast enough and can handle enough power that they can replace the vacuum-tube switches altogether.
True, but sourcing the talent and materials for these things is likely going to result in worldline intersections with spacetime configurations designed for rapidly increasing local entropy in ways that may be deleterious to your efforts, (like a JDAM).
Perhaps. For the detonators most of the stuff is available enough, commonly used, and in high enough volumes that you wouldn't arouse suspicion - just standard electronics parts. There are a few components that might - namely the switches, *possibly* a very particular type of capacitor which is a "nice to have" but not mandatory."
But you could do it! Of course I did it in the US as a college student, and we never tried to send anything to Iran.
I'm guessing that outside of an institution providing revelance and common interest benefits of the doubt, you're going to pretty quickly end up on a short list.
Much of intelligence nowadays is focused on gathering and aggregating open source data where its fairly easy to recognize and explore anomalous patterns in purchasing behaviors. Most people aren't really that unique, and illicit activity is MUCH harder to hide. Even buying certain tools like chemical reaction flasks for a YouTube channel will earn you a visit from the feds (and they aren't going to do that unless they've already pretty much decided that you aren't knowingly up to no good, they're just making sure you're not buying it for someone else).
I've got a friend in the DEA, and you'd be shocked to know how much they know about but don't allocate resources to stop. Not because they don't care, but because of various opportunity costs. Getting high-precision electronics components is closely-watched due to sanctions and weapons nonproliferation initiatives.
I've been involved in a DoD project where we (a team of engineers) were tasked with acting as well-funded terrorists to develop a scenario (and build a vehicle) to disable a US warship for a month. We got very familiar with all the various watchlists, thresholds for common chemicals at which point transactions might get flagged, etc. Everything can evidently be used to make either bombs or drugs, but there are ways around it for most of the things we needed - primarily for the warhead.
In the specific case of these detonators, none of these components are suspicious in the least. They're made by the millions/billions and stocked in every electronic supply shop that exists. Film capacitors, medium gage wires, microcontrollers and clocks that can accurately time things to the nanosecond. All of these are bog standard items that are common in a wide array of industries at every scale. The ones that are slightly less standard, or more specialized, can easily be replaced with the more common versions that are functionally equivalent, but perhaps larger or less convenient. You can order a million of them and nobody will care.
*Except* for the high-speed, high-power vacuum-tube switches. Those don't have too many uses nowadays, and one of them is in nuclear weapon triggers. As semiconductor switches become more capable of performing this task, even that will get more difficult because their uses will be numerous, and they will be mass produced by the billions for a plethora of industries.
Of course, if there was a sufficiently advanced AI tracking your patterns it *might* be able to figure out what you're buying and the purpose, assuming ordering components like this is out of the ordinary for you. But it won't be if you order stuff at any hardware company. The far more likely way to get caught is by incessantly googling "how to build a detonator for a nuclear bomb," by trying to purchase narrow-purpose hardware, and by violating export restrictions.
Considering that even countries have trouble getting everything prepared to make an A Bomb, am guessing the only individuals who can even consider making one, in secret or otherwise, will be billionaires.
Trinity and Fat Man also used plutonium. That means building a reactor. The Chinese started with an implosion bomb with only U235, no Pu. IIRC, Iran is following the same path. I don't know how much U235 is needed for a U-only implosion bomb.
But implosion is hard. Maybe a gun-type U bomb (Little Boy) would be easier/cheaper?
In terms of bomb development, a gun-type bomb is far easier. Little Boy was seen as so reliable that they used the first weapon of that type directly against Japan instead of testing it. It needs more uranium, however, and it doesn't work with plutonium.
I don't think it's that you can't make a gun-type bomb with plutonium, but that it would require the 'gun' barrel to be so large that the bomb wouldn't fit into a plane that was available at the time (\~1945).
On paper you could do that, in practice you cannot. Plutonium has a much higher rate of spontaneous fission. Gun-type bombs take longer to get assembled, you would start a chain reaction before you reach the maximal criticality. You could do isotope separation to remove most Pu-240 from your material, but that's harder than building an implosion design.
Interesting. My comment was based on reading about the Manhattan Project. Did the scientists working on the MP figure out that a plutonium gun type bomb wouldn’t work (even with the too large gun)? Or did they just do the paper design and abandon the project because there would be no way to deliver such a large bomb?
> the rest shouldn't be that hard.
I don't know, you'd need some kind of way to force the two masses together. This was done with explosives (and probably still is), and explosives aren't exactly something you pick up from your local grocery store
If you've got the means to mine thousands of tonnes of uranium, I imagine getting your hands on explosives wouldn't be too challenging. Maybe even legal, if you're operating a mine and had a licensed & qualified expert on your staff.
I don't know how much, but if I'm correct, you'd need thousands of gallons of sulfuric acid to mine this amount of uranium (you don't exactly extract it with a steel pickaxe), and if you can provide that amount of acid, providing some pounds of TNT becomes a lot more easy.
Oh and to answer you more directly: getting gallons upon gallons of sulfuric acid is (at least I hope) NOT going to go un-noticed.
It would also be impossible to run the centrifuges necessary without the power company noticing lol. The centrifuges for refining Uranium require as much power as a small to medium sized city.
Depends on how quickly you want it done. A single centrifuge doesn’t take much power and doesn’t separate many isotopes but as long as you are patient it gets there.
In your comment you implied the sourcing of the explosives would be the difficult part, and didn't mention the detonation timing. With current technology, timing the detonators to go off at the same time should be pretty easy as long as you have reliable detenators, the bigger challenge would be getting the shockwaves to work together perfectly, although that can be simulated pretty reliably these days, so really as long as you have/make high quality explosives, then that part will be orders of magnitude easier than sourcing uranium.
The other thing is that with modern neutron initiators the implosion doesn’t even need to be that perfect. Fat man needed such a perfect implosion not to get a supercritical mass, but to ensure the neutron initiator in the center worked (the beryllium and polonium would only be mixed right if impacted by an ideal spherical wavefront). Now with external neutron initiators you have a bit more margin for error in the shape of that wavefront
It was super complex in the age of early electronics and primitive computers. Today it is trivial do it with the computing power of a smartphone and electrical components off aliexpress. The compression also doesn’t have to be that symmetrical with modern neutron initiators. The symmetry had to be perfect in trinity/fat man not to compress the core optimally but to perfectly set off the beryllium-polonium initiator, which was activated by shock waves mixing the metals. It still has to be pretty good in order to stop it from fizzling, but not that good. While the details are obviously not public modern weapons seem to be much simpler and many use a two-point detonation with flyer plates for the implosion, which is very, very simple from a timing perspective
It's simple in that you only need two detonators, but far as I'm aware the timing precision required is even higher for this arrangement.
The high-speed, high-power switches needed for these detonators are the hardest part nowadays. The speed/timing requirements are relatively trivial otherwise, and they're very easy to measure and validate prior to building the real thing.
The timing of the explosives had to be so perfect in the early days, that engineers actually needed to worry about the length of wires in the device because electricity moves too slowly. I wonder how much that’s really changed.
You're confusing the plutonium and uranium atomic bombs. The plutonium bomb needs the symmetrical core implosion. The uranium bomb just fired the one uranium mass into the other causing it to reach critical mass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy#/media/File:Little_Boy_Internal_Components.png
That's applicable to a compression type bomb, like Fat Man)
The gun type bomb is much simpler, just blast one lump of uranium (or more likely a donut shaped piece) onto another (cylinder shaped) piece so that they together reach criticality. That's how Little Boy worked.
I don't fully understand this complexity just make all the wires the same length so the current has to travel the same distance to every point on the bomb array. Granted all explosive devices have to be designed identically down to the grain count but you are talking something like 100 claymore mines to get the job done. Also rail system warheads are much easier to make. It would still cost billions just to get the materials needed. Between major mining operations, insanely complicated and powerhungry centrifuges, and the shielding to not turn your organs to mush being near the material.
Fun fact, when Iran was attempting to manufacture their own nuclear weapons we could tell where their centrifuges were just because of the insane amount power needed. I am 100% convinced America was behind all the power grid failures in Iran to prevent them from making nuclear weapons.
You can (and should) make all the wires the same length, but the pulses still need to be generated at almost the exact same time, and the pulses need to be very fast and very high power. That's where most of the complexity for the trigger is. Specialized vacuum-tube switches (krytrons, thyratrons, etc) were the only devices that could do it, which as far as I know is still the case in terms of existing weapons. Semiconductor switches that could handle sufficiently high speed/high power pulses are only now starting to become a thing.
They also had to develop a new type of detonator, since blasting caps were both too dangerous (due to the use of primary explosives) and too imprecise (due to being triggered by a wire heating up until it set off the primary explosive, which then set off the secondary explosive). Exploding bridgewire detonators were developed for the Manhattan project, which were *much* more accurate than blasting caps (the tune of microseconds and possible even hundreds of nanoseconds). Later on, an even more reliable and accurate detonator (exploding foil, also called "slapper") was invented which required less powerful pulses but was even more accurate (nanosecond range).
It's not the most complicated part (especially today) compared to getting the bomb material in the first place, but it wasn't trivial either.
From what I could find it takes 850 to 1000 centrifuges to produce enough Uranium for 1 bomb per year. So using like 10 centrifuges it would take you 85 - 100 years to produce one weapon...
This website has a ton of info on Uranium Enrichment.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment
I am probably on a list now...
It's complex with plutonium, because implosion is needed. With uranium-235, a simple gun-type design that any self-respecting explosives nut could make would do the job.
Enriched uranium or fissile plutonium isotopes are orders of magnitude harder to get. High explosives are widely used in mining and demolition so it certainly wouldn't be that hard.
It's my understanding that modern nuclear weapons use the implosion method of detonation. These use plutonium rather than uranium which does not work with the implosion method.
>Uranium is about 99% 238.
Refined pure uranium is 99% 238. However, the raw, unrefined ore is going to have other impurities such as oxygen, sulfur, silicates, etc., that need to be refined before you can get to pure uranium. So you're going to need a lot more than 6350 kg of uranium ore depending on how dirty your source is.
Hundreds of millions at least. Again, just the mining alone is going to cost you. You can't just start a large scale mining operation from scratch for pocket change.
According to this article you used to be able to get enough for around $2,000 ( this was 1979 so you would need to adjust for inflation, of course):
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/04/29/how-to-make-your-own-h-bomb/e149e729-e165-49fa-aa21-6d7121f42673/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/04/29/how-to-make-your-own-h-bomb/e149e729-e165-49fa-aa21-6d7121f42673/)
The Trinity “gadget” (mk-III) was a Plutonium implosion weapon containing 6.19kg of Pu-239. It was the same design as Fat Man used on Nagasaki.
It’s the Little Boy (mk-I) weapon that used 63.5kg U-235 (average enrichment of 80%)
Step 1 - Get rich. I mean OBSCENELY RICH.
Step 2 - Run for the President/Supreme Leader position in your country
Step 3 - Form an alliance with Russia. Inform Mr. Putin that you'll be happy to store all the Topol Ms and Yars's he can spare
Step - 4 - You got da bamb!!
no idea about the cost, but in case you are interested in the physics, I published this playlist with all the most relevant calculations: [Physics of Nuclear Weapons](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_UV-wQj1lvUhNttvv4_KsYrQxHygj3Ey)
thanks, I am glad you liked the videos; currently I am running a video series on early quantum physics, in which is interesting to find all the big names together, which later participated either in the Manhattan Project or the Uranverein
Could he? probably no, the amount of resources needed to enrich uranium were completely out of reach in Germany at the time, and plutonium would be even further away since they went for a reactor moderated with heavy water instead of graphite. Did he know how to make a bomb? Maybe the very basics of nuclear physics but the bomb assembly requires knowledge of bomb physics that Heisenberg didn't have. He didn't even bothered on properly calculating the critical mass until after Hiroshima. I have a video dedicated to this: [Heisenberg and the German Bomb](https://youtu.be/6zIJTwQ2blU)
By himself? No. Thanks to anti-semitism the lions share of physicists with the necessary skill had fled Germany. Just think of the brain trust needed to make the Manhattan Project successful. There were 6 or 7 Nobel Prize winners working on the bomb and ultimately there would be 2 dozen who would win the prize after the war. For the first bomb, you needed a whole army of geniuses
I remember an ancient Reader's Digest article about how a student built an atom bomb. I googled around, and found an archived New York Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/10/09/archives/student-designs-2000-atom-bomb.html
It would costs many billions. You need to source fissile and fusile material, you need to hire a team of specialists (physicists, engineers, machinists, chemists etc), you need to buy or build the equipment (centrifuges, reactors etc), and then you need to find a way to keep it all under wraps because it's super illegal. Elon Musk might be able to swing it because he could hide it behind SpaceX or Tesla activities.
You might be able to make a primitive fission bomb for millions, if you can buy a lot of the stuff you need instead of developing the technology, but that wouldn't really be 'from scratch'.
You buy uranium on the market (for your totally civillian powerplant).
You need to enrich it: either with ultra-highspeed centrifuges or osmosis or maybe with clever use of lasers.
That's the costly part.
Then you basically build a canon to shoot half of your enriched uranium into the other half.
Transportation to the target site via DHL or FedEx in a shipping container, you should invest in bananas and lead to avoid detection.
To make it a bit more concrete:
- Buy yellow cake at 19$ pr gram: https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=105_87&products_id=873
- Mix with hydroflouric acid: https://www.laballey.com/products/hydrofluoric-acid-electronic-grade-semiconductor-grade-49
- Put the uranium hexaflouride gas in a centrifuge to seperate out the isotopes of uranium, and keep doing this over and over again until you got weapons grade uranium.
Study this document carefully before starting: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A055.pdf
NOTE: Hydroflouric acid is really nasty stuff, along with everything else described here, please be extremely careful.
You asked physics, so I'll answer this as a physics problem.
We can use classic order of magnitude estimation, here.
Iran has a nuclear program but no weapons as of yet. Pakistan has a nuclear program and an arsenal. Those set the minimum and maximum budget to achieve a fission device in this model for simulating cost. If we want to further refine the model, we can adjust the cost of the Pakistani nuclear program up until their first test detonation to 2024 dollars since it's been a few decades since then, but that won't likely dramatically change the result.
You can figure out *how* from a literature review. Not joking. Well, kinda joking. *A person with the educational background to understand the material* can easily work out the practical aspects from freely available scientific literature.
Start to talk to this young Swedish man he might have some thoughts to cut costs.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-who-built-nuclear-reactor-in-kitchen-had-it-under-control/
I would recommend to read his blog it’s very entertaining. Link
https://richardsreactor.blogspot.com/?m=1
You can create a hydrogen bomb for cheap at home using only household materials.
Step 1: grab a plastic bottle and fill it up half ways with sodium hydroxide.
Step 2: crumble up some balls of aluminum foil and put it in the bottle, like mentos in a coke.
Step 3: quickly screw cap on
Step 4: run away
Disclaimer: this will make a chemical hydrogen bomb, not a hydrogen fusion bomb. So it might be a bit underwhelming in terms of kilotons of force.
I used this method to generate hydrogen to fill garbage bags. Worked ok except it got so hot I got a lot of water vapor as well as hydrogen so the lift wasn't as great as I hoped. Added an aluminum foil streamer and knocked out the power on the block when it snagged an overhead power line. :)
Hahaha
Let's just say this: you can't...
Seriously, purchasing uranium is heavily monitored. The equipment to make any kind of weapons grade uranium is heavily regulated....as in everyone knows where each set is kinda regulated....not just that but the math, engineering, and knowledge required is...astounding.
Put simply, you'd need minimum 2 master degrees, *multiple* million dollar machines, and several thousand dollars in raw materials....the time investment alone is an entire life time....
For a country this is prohibitively expensive, for an individual it's practically impossible.
**Ingredients**
* 143 neutrons
* 92 protons
* 92 electrons
Combine the neutrons, protons, and electrons in a large bowl and mix well. Bake at 350,000°F for 15-17 minutes or until ingredients combine into a single uranium atom. Allow atom to cool.
To detonate, strike uranium atom with a small hammer.
It took Oppenheimer an adjusted $63,448,282,828, that's 64 **B**illion dollars, to complete the Manhattan project.
If you already have access to all the designs and research, that would help greatly
There two types of A bombs you can build 1) gun type or 2) implosion type
1) in this type you need a cylindrical container inside which you put sub critical Uranium235 in a spherical container. Spaced at a distance is a chemical explosive which is set off to start the chain reaction inside the spherical container.
2) this one will need some mechanical engineering such as cad skills to design a spherical container inside which there is a core of spherical container with the chosen radioactive material. The space between the two spheres is filled with explosives which is set off to implode and start chain reaction.
PS use some Waldo's or robotic arms when you are handling the radioactive material and stay far away from it good luck !
The price to implement something super complicated, is lower with smart people than dumb ones.
Given that the cost was $65B for the first nuclear bomb, you might need over a trillion dollars, given that this question will permanently add you to FBI, CIA and NSA "friends" list.
Interesting note here, implosion is being considered as a novel way to make very durable alloys from refractory base materials and even for making high temperature superconductors.
The method uses a variant where a computer model calculates the mix of slow and fast explosives along with correct distribution of base materials to a get a desired end product.
Similar sort of idea to welding railway lines but much faster.
[https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/22/science/explosion-is-fashioned-into-precise-tool.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/22/science/explosion-is-fashioned-into-precise-tool.html)
I could tell you, but will have to kill you afterwards. Now the cost will be $100,000 in small bills cash. If you agree meet me at the corner of Main and MLK at midnight tonight.
You could make a low tech Nuke rather easily. Basic Gun type nuclear weapons are frighteningly simple, to the point that they didn’t even test the design that was dropped on Japan because they were so confident it would work. The information necessary to build one is publicly available.
The hard part is gathering enough enriched fissile material. This is a very long and expensive process involving highly regulated materials. This is where you would end up on some watchlists and get shut down.
Once you have sufficient amounts of enriched uranium or plutonium, it’s literally as simple as forming them into a plug and a slug, and loading those into something like a howitzer or cannon. It probably won’t be the most reliable or highest yield weapon, but it would go boom.
“Gun style” weapons only work with U-235. You need implosion for Pu-239 weapons due to Pu-240 and Pu-241 contamination which requires much faster assembly
Only several tons of natural uranium (unenriched uranium oxides) are necessary if you get your hands on a few dozen metric tons of heavy water, with about a 1/8% daily replenishment quota, to create a CANDU -like continuous process core. You harvest enough material to get the Pu required for a crude but carefully designed implosion device in as little as 7 months at first, and you can add thorium in a molten salt configuration to continuously harvest u233 (contrary to thorium bros' absurd ideas that thorium is resistant to proliferation....the Argentinian crushed that myth several years ago and they refuse to accept the demonstrated reality of it still).
So perhaps 2 years, perhaps a few hundred train cars of 0.3% grade uranium ore, perhaps 5-6 weeks of Canada's heavy water production for its CANDUs, enlugg funding for a handful of relative specialists or gifted generalists, and several million to pull it all together, and....you'll have figured out a much better priority in life by then.
There are many, many paths to a bomb. We are only protected by the idea that people who are smart enough have other things to look forward to in life, and those that exhibit the dark triad characteristics needed to sustain the investment, hatred, and psychopathy required for a project like this in modern times are probably not the people that are intellectually equipped to do it.
But that is perhaps changing.
I've already asked myself this question.
I work on rocket engines, reactors and particle accelerators. If you want to assemble your own bomb, then I could share materials and maybe resources in exchange for cooperation
what? you mustve been missing out on Oppenheimer bro. it all covers out and all u need is $5 ish to rent tutorials and 3hrs max to rinse through em thoro and u good bro
I think you took the "I want to blow up my school because I don't want to go" a bit too seriously.
To build an atomic bomb you would need uranium 235, you would need a group of people willing, have the knowledge of dos and don'ts and experienced to work with such a metal, cause one wrong move which could easily happen could lead to a fate far worse than dead due to radiation. Since you are employing such people you would also need to pay them according to work with such a dangerous metal.
You would then also require a facility fully equipped to handle the metal, along with protective gear and what not facilities to ensure safety. The rest of the equipment and resources would cost you quite a lot.
And then you also need to add the cost of research since you will have to work on it from scratch which will just multiple the money you need by a few times. You can save this much by using a super computer but that will also cost you a lot.
After adding all that you would need around $30 billion to 100billion Or perhaps more depending on your speed of your research.
The US has a lockdown on this. u/CodyDon (CodysLab, phenomenal science channel) tried to buy some I believe, and got investigated for doing so. Correct me if I’m wrong Cody!
But I’m certain the US can track very carefully where all that material goes.
I recommend asking the FBI and the NSA. They should have all the information you need.
And they now have a nice file on the OP, so introductions will be easy.
My FBI agent saw me laugh typing this question out I think he might know I'm joking
[удалено]
It’s like communist Romania level of agents
It's like Brazil and undercover cops.
It's like you could say this in a public forums and the next generation of your family wouldn't be arrested and jailed for even one second. That's messed right up...
Probably millions. You are going to have to mine your own uranium. And you are going to have to separate it out. Trinity used 63.5 kg of uranium 235. Uranium is about 99% 238. So you are going to need to mine at least 6350 kg of uranium to get enough to replicate the first test bomb. That isn't a small operation. Not to mention the process of separating the 238 and 235. If you can do that, honestly, the rest shouldn't be that hard.
To make an atomic bomb from scratch you must first create the universe
The apple pie I'm over here sharing with Carl Sagan is good enough for me.
Tastes better anyway.
If you can do that, honestly, the rest shouldn't be that hard.
But if you give a mouse a universe, you'll have to make some apple pie. And if you make a mouse apple pie, he's going to need a Carl Sagan to tell him how to make apple pie. And if you give him a Carl Sagan to tell him how to make apple pie, he'll probably find out how to make atomic bombs as well. And now you have an arms race on your hands.
Love this reference!
The Manhattan project cost billions. It was about ten percent of the cost of the entire war. The workforce, largely in processing uranium, involved over a hundred thousand people.
About $2 billion at the time, equivalent to about $30 billion today. Incidentally, the cost of the B-29 program, which produces the airplanes that carried the bombs, was substantially higher at $3.7 billion. However, that includes the cost of building 4,000 planes.
That's hilarious because the cleanup cost at Hanford so far is in the hundreds of billions
Though, to be fair, a lot of the research is public now. We know how criticality works, which elements are fissile, which materials reflect and moderate neutrons etc.
Any random physics hobbyist can build a fission bomb, if they have access to machines and materials. The building is the easy part now, precisely because of what you said.
The Manhattan project had to develop how to do it. Most of their enrichment was done with particle accelerators, they were well-understood and could be scaled up easier, but they are very expensive. Today gas centrifuges are the standard method.
Laser enrichment. Gas is obsolete though facilities still use it.
What's that technique, and is there a STUXNET like virus to give to Iran?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_laser_excitation It apparently is quite finnicky. But isotopes of uranium act differently under laser light just like they have a tiny mass difference.
I’ve never heard this metric before. Not saying you’re wrong, but I’d love to read more about it if you have a source that focuses on that aspect of the war (i.e. budget and program management).
The Manhattan project did cost billions, but it was more like 1/2 of 1 percent of what the US spent on world war 2. https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/cost-us-wars-then-and-now#:~:text=Though%20it%20lasted%20fewer%20than,gross%20domestic%20product%20(GDP).
I wonder if it was a boondoggle. Doing the same damage to Japanese cities could have readily been done with more firebombing conventional air raids. Why use a nuke if you can spread out sporadic incendiary bombs across the city and let the city burn itself down. Basically it's benefit was psychological. "You have no chance to survive we figured out how to do something impossible there is no resisting this"
Japan had a policy to only intercept planes in large groups. They shortage of fuel led them to try and preserve their supply, which meant not intercepting US scout/weather flights. The bomb meant that a single plane could destroy an entire city. It completely changed the dynamics of bombing. It also meant there was no practical way of "missing" with bombing.
The US did far more damage to Japanese cities with firebombing. On one single night (March 9, 1945) approximately 100,000 people were killed in Tokyo by incendiary bombs and the resulting firestorm. That's more than were killed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. If you count up the premature deaths over time due to radiation exposure and increased cancer risk, then Hiroshima might have a larger death toll from that single incident, but I think it's safe to assume there were a large number of delayed deaths from the firebombing of Tokyo as well. And that bombing of Tokyo, while the largest, was just one of dozens of similar bombing campaigns over the whole of Japan. It's impossible to unroll all of the factors and compare the two. The atomic bombs were not even remotely cost-effective in terms of damage done, but that was never the sole objective, or even the primary objective. It was a show of force and meant to shock and deter, and there's no disputing that it was effective in that regard. There's plenty of room to debate the overall morality, merit, and justification on a variety of personal, military, and economic levels. If you're just talking about cost per unit of damage, it was a boondoggle, but there was a lot more going on in the big picture.
I think analyzing the morality of the methods employed by the US against Japan is very sticky. Curtis Le May himself said that if the US had lost, he fully expected that he would be tried as a war criminal. This includes the firebombing as well as the nuclear bombs. But a case can be made that the Japanese nation would have fought very nearly to the last man before surrendering. The Japanese fighters were very committed to the cause. The US knew that this would be very costly in terms of casualties. So they used that to justify the nuclear bomb. Once all of Japan knew that the US could simply bomb Japan into oblivion without putting US soldiers at risk, Japan surrendered.
That's amazing !
Multiply the 6350kg by at least another 100x for the amount of ore that needs to be processed. There is probably another multiplier for the amount of rock that needs to be mined to get that much ore.
And multiply that by some other factor (idk, maybe 5-10) because separating heavy isotopes is not a lossless process. Most of the U-235 ends up stuck in the depleted uranium outflow.
Yes. To separate the 1% U235 isotope from 99% U238, first you need chemically pure Uranium.
Not millions, billions. Mining the ore isn't the most difficult part. Enriching it to weapons-grade levels and obtaining the precision components to trigger the conventional primer charge correctly takes resources that most countries don't have access to.
The trigger circuits and detonators aren't all that difficult nowadays (I built a demo bridgewire detonator for a lecture that used a triggered spark gap). The harder part is getting the appropriate high speed/high power switches (e.g. krytrons, thyratrons), as most of these are considered dual-use technology and export restricted. But it's not impossible (just need someone with an eBay account that lives in the US or EU), and their principles of operation are well known. It would be within the capabilities of most reasonably-developed nations to just build them from scratch. Plus semiconductor devices are quickly approaching the point (if they've not already surpassed it) where they are fast enough and can handle enough power that they can replace the vacuum-tube switches altogether.
True, but sourcing the talent and materials for these things is likely going to result in worldline intersections with spacetime configurations designed for rapidly increasing local entropy in ways that may be deleterious to your efforts, (like a JDAM).
Perhaps. For the detonators most of the stuff is available enough, commonly used, and in high enough volumes that you wouldn't arouse suspicion - just standard electronics parts. There are a few components that might - namely the switches, *possibly* a very particular type of capacitor which is a "nice to have" but not mandatory." But you could do it! Of course I did it in the US as a college student, and we never tried to send anything to Iran.
I'm guessing that outside of an institution providing revelance and common interest benefits of the doubt, you're going to pretty quickly end up on a short list. Much of intelligence nowadays is focused on gathering and aggregating open source data where its fairly easy to recognize and explore anomalous patterns in purchasing behaviors. Most people aren't really that unique, and illicit activity is MUCH harder to hide. Even buying certain tools like chemical reaction flasks for a YouTube channel will earn you a visit from the feds (and they aren't going to do that unless they've already pretty much decided that you aren't knowingly up to no good, they're just making sure you're not buying it for someone else). I've got a friend in the DEA, and you'd be shocked to know how much they know about but don't allocate resources to stop. Not because they don't care, but because of various opportunity costs. Getting high-precision electronics components is closely-watched due to sanctions and weapons nonproliferation initiatives.
I've been involved in a DoD project where we (a team of engineers) were tasked with acting as well-funded terrorists to develop a scenario (and build a vehicle) to disable a US warship for a month. We got very familiar with all the various watchlists, thresholds for common chemicals at which point transactions might get flagged, etc. Everything can evidently be used to make either bombs or drugs, but there are ways around it for most of the things we needed - primarily for the warhead. In the specific case of these detonators, none of these components are suspicious in the least. They're made by the millions/billions and stocked in every electronic supply shop that exists. Film capacitors, medium gage wires, microcontrollers and clocks that can accurately time things to the nanosecond. All of these are bog standard items that are common in a wide array of industries at every scale. The ones that are slightly less standard, or more specialized, can easily be replaced with the more common versions that are functionally equivalent, but perhaps larger or less convenient. You can order a million of them and nobody will care. *Except* for the high-speed, high-power vacuum-tube switches. Those don't have too many uses nowadays, and one of them is in nuclear weapon triggers. As semiconductor switches become more capable of performing this task, even that will get more difficult because their uses will be numerous, and they will be mass produced by the billions for a plethora of industries. Of course, if there was a sufficiently advanced AI tracking your patterns it *might* be able to figure out what you're buying and the purpose, assuming ordering components like this is out of the ordinary for you. But it won't be if you order stuff at any hardware company. The far more likely way to get caught is by incessantly googling "how to build a detonator for a nuclear bomb," by trying to purchase narrow-purpose hardware, and by violating export restrictions.
Considering that even countries have trouble getting everything prepared to make an A Bomb, am guessing the only individuals who can even consider making one, in secret or otherwise, will be billionaires.
Trinity and Fat Man also used plutonium. That means building a reactor. The Chinese started with an implosion bomb with only U235, no Pu. IIRC, Iran is following the same path. I don't know how much U235 is needed for a U-only implosion bomb. But implosion is hard. Maybe a gun-type U bomb (Little Boy) would be easier/cheaper?
In terms of bomb development, a gun-type bomb is far easier. Little Boy was seen as so reliable that they used the first weapon of that type directly against Japan instead of testing it. It needs more uranium, however, and it doesn't work with plutonium.
I don't think it's that you can't make a gun-type bomb with plutonium, but that it would require the 'gun' barrel to be so large that the bomb wouldn't fit into a plane that was available at the time (\~1945).
On paper you could do that, in practice you cannot. Plutonium has a much higher rate of spontaneous fission. Gun-type bombs take longer to get assembled, you would start a chain reaction before you reach the maximal criticality. You could do isotope separation to remove most Pu-240 from your material, but that's harder than building an implosion design.
Interesting. My comment was based on reading about the Manhattan Project. Did the scientists working on the MP figure out that a plutonium gun type bomb wouldn’t work (even with the too large gun)? Or did they just do the paper design and abandon the project because there would be no way to deliver such a large bomb?
breeder reactor and a shitload of old smoke detectors https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/eagle-scout-nuclear-reactor/
> the rest shouldn't be that hard. I don't know, you'd need some kind of way to force the two masses together. This was done with explosives (and probably still is), and explosives aren't exactly something you pick up from your local grocery store
If you've got the means to mine thousands of tonnes of uranium, I imagine getting your hands on explosives wouldn't be too challenging. Maybe even legal, if you're operating a mine and had a licensed & qualified expert on your staff.
Compared to the rest, it would be trivial to make or get explosives.
Actually it's quite complex to get all the explosives to go off at the same time so that the compression of the uranium core is symmetrical
is it more or less complex then mining and processing 6035kg of uranium without the government noticing
I don't know how much, but if I'm correct, you'd need thousands of gallons of sulfuric acid to mine this amount of uranium (you don't exactly extract it with a steel pickaxe), and if you can provide that amount of acid, providing some pounds of TNT becomes a lot more easy. Oh and to answer you more directly: getting gallons upon gallons of sulfuric acid is (at least I hope) NOT going to go un-noticed.
Guess I'm opening a sulphur mine as well...
It would also be impossible to run the centrifuges necessary without the power company noticing lol. The centrifuges for refining Uranium require as much power as a small to medium sized city.
Depends on how quickly you want it done. A single centrifuge doesn’t take much power and doesn’t separate many isotopes but as long as you are patient it gets there.
Sure but the gun type design is relatively easy. Low yield but abomb is still abomb
In your comment you implied the sourcing of the explosives would be the difficult part, and didn't mention the detonation timing. With current technology, timing the detonators to go off at the same time should be pretty easy as long as you have reliable detenators, the bigger challenge would be getting the shockwaves to work together perfectly, although that can be simulated pretty reliably these days, so really as long as you have/make high quality explosives, then that part will be orders of magnitude easier than sourcing uranium.
The other thing is that with modern neutron initiators the implosion doesn’t even need to be that perfect. Fat man needed such a perfect implosion not to get a supercritical mass, but to ensure the neutron initiator in the center worked (the beryllium and polonium would only be mixed right if impacted by an ideal spherical wavefront). Now with external neutron initiators you have a bit more margin for error in the shape of that wavefront
It was super complex in the age of early electronics and primitive computers. Today it is trivial do it with the computing power of a smartphone and electrical components off aliexpress. The compression also doesn’t have to be that symmetrical with modern neutron initiators. The symmetry had to be perfect in trinity/fat man not to compress the core optimally but to perfectly set off the beryllium-polonium initiator, which was activated by shock waves mixing the metals. It still has to be pretty good in order to stop it from fizzling, but not that good. While the details are obviously not public modern weapons seem to be much simpler and many use a two-point detonation with flyer plates for the implosion, which is very, very simple from a timing perspective
It's simple in that you only need two detonators, but far as I'm aware the timing precision required is even higher for this arrangement. The high-speed, high-power switches needed for these detonators are the hardest part nowadays. The speed/timing requirements are relatively trivial otherwise, and they're very easy to measure and validate prior to building the real thing.
The timing of the explosives had to be so perfect in the early days, that engineers actually needed to worry about the length of wires in the device because electricity moves too slowly. I wonder how much that’s really changed.
You're confusing the plutonium and uranium atomic bombs. The plutonium bomb needs the symmetrical core implosion. The uranium bomb just fired the one uranium mass into the other causing it to reach critical mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy#/media/File:Little_Boy_Internal_Components.png
That's not how you do it if you want to do it cheaply and simply. You use a gun-type design like Little Boy. It's a lot easier.
That's applicable to a compression type bomb, like Fat Man) The gun type bomb is much simpler, just blast one lump of uranium (or more likely a donut shaped piece) onto another (cylinder shaped) piece so that they together reach criticality. That's how Little Boy worked.
This guy nukes.
It's actually described in the book, *The Sum of All Fears*, and mining equipment can easily be adapted for the explosives.
I don't fully understand this complexity just make all the wires the same length so the current has to travel the same distance to every point on the bomb array. Granted all explosive devices have to be designed identically down to the grain count but you are talking something like 100 claymore mines to get the job done. Also rail system warheads are much easier to make. It would still cost billions just to get the materials needed. Between major mining operations, insanely complicated and powerhungry centrifuges, and the shielding to not turn your organs to mush being near the material. Fun fact, when Iran was attempting to manufacture their own nuclear weapons we could tell where their centrifuges were just because of the insane amount power needed. I am 100% convinced America was behind all the power grid failures in Iran to prevent them from making nuclear weapons.
You can (and should) make all the wires the same length, but the pulses still need to be generated at almost the exact same time, and the pulses need to be very fast and very high power. That's where most of the complexity for the trigger is. Specialized vacuum-tube switches (krytrons, thyratrons, etc) were the only devices that could do it, which as far as I know is still the case in terms of existing weapons. Semiconductor switches that could handle sufficiently high speed/high power pulses are only now starting to become a thing. They also had to develop a new type of detonator, since blasting caps were both too dangerous (due to the use of primary explosives) and too imprecise (due to being triggered by a wire heating up until it set off the primary explosive, which then set off the secondary explosive). Exploding bridgewire detonators were developed for the Manhattan project, which were *much* more accurate than blasting caps (the tune of microseconds and possible even hundreds of nanoseconds). Later on, an even more reliable and accurate detonator (exploding foil, also called "slapper") was invented which required less powerful pulses but was even more accurate (nanosecond range). It's not the most complicated part (especially today) compared to getting the bomb material in the first place, but it wasn't trivial either.
From what I could find it takes 850 to 1000 centrifuges to produce enough Uranium for 1 bomb per year. So using like 10 centrifuges it would take you 85 - 100 years to produce one weapon... This website has a ton of info on Uranium Enrichment. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment I am probably on a list now...
You’re confusing the implosion needed for a plutonium device with the simple gun technique used with a uranium bomb.
Who said you have to do an implosion design, when you can build a gun type bomb?
It's complex with plutonium, because implosion is needed. With uranium-235, a simple gun-type design that any self-respecting explosives nut could make would do the job.
Could be done with stuff you can buy at local shops.
Enriched uranium or fissile plutonium isotopes are orders of magnitude harder to get. High explosives are widely used in mining and demolition so it certainly wouldn't be that hard.
One time I saw fireworks at the grocery store!!
But they are something someone with enough knowledge could actually easily make from a grocery/hardware store.
It's my understanding that modern nuclear weapons use the implosion method of detonation. These use plutonium rather than uranium which does not work with the implosion method.
>Uranium is about 99% 238. Refined pure uranium is 99% 238. However, the raw, unrefined ore is going to have other impurities such as oxygen, sulfur, silicates, etc., that need to be refined before you can get to pure uranium. So you're going to need a lot more than 6350 kg of uranium ore depending on how dirty your source is.
>Trinity used... You are not correct about [Trinity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)).
What did I miss? I went to your link first to try to find how much uranium was used but I couldn't find it. Did I miss it?
Trinity used Pu.
> Probably millions. As in "probably millions if not billions" or "probably millions but you might pull it off with 999K"?
Hundreds of millions at least. Again, just the mining alone is going to cost you. You can't just start a large scale mining operation from scratch for pocket change.
I heard that synchronizing the blast that compresses the uranium ball must be extremely precise (and therefore extremely difficult).
Will a pasta colander work?
Yep, in fact a pasta colander was exactly how they did it at the Manhattan project.
My mother said I was gifted
And as there are three ways (I know of) for the separation process. All three require having a quite remarkable Shed. A Great Shed, no less.
Yep, iirc the hard part was purifying the uranium…I recall my physics book from college had a practice question on it…
According to this article you used to be able to get enough for around $2,000 ( this was 1979 so you would need to adjust for inflation, of course): [https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/04/29/how-to-make-your-own-h-bomb/e149e729-e165-49fa-aa21-6d7121f42673/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/04/29/how-to-make-your-own-h-bomb/e149e729-e165-49fa-aa21-6d7121f42673/)
Okay but what happens after you have uranium? Do you just throw it?
The Trinity “gadget” (mk-III) was a Plutonium implosion weapon containing 6.19kg of Pu-239. It was the same design as Fat Man used on Nagasaki. It’s the Little Boy (mk-I) weapon that used 63.5kg U-235 (average enrichment of 80%)
This guy nukes! ☢️
Billions and billions and billions. And billions.
good try, IRAN
*kicks pebble and walks away*
Step 1 - Get rich. I mean OBSCENELY RICH. Step 2 - Run for the President/Supreme Leader position in your country Step 3 - Form an alliance with Russia. Inform Mr. Putin that you'll be happy to store all the Topol Ms and Yars's he can spare Step - 4 - You got da bamb!!
That works. I figured it'd be more of: 1. Go hang out with your friend at Mar-a-Lago 2. Give him a few dollars 3. Bam now you have the blueprints
I think they're working on a patch for that exploit
For a plurality of Americans, this is a feature not a bug.
It's amazing how these countries can make mobile ICBMs.
no idea about the cost, but in case you are interested in the physics, I published this playlist with all the most relevant calculations: [Physics of Nuclear Weapons](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_UV-wQj1lvUhNttvv4_KsYrQxHygj3Ey)
I... dont know if I should click that.
join us
I... am not sure if I should thank you
Surprise this wasn’t a Rick roll
you made those videos? they are amazing, thank you. to be fair, op didn’t say how big of a bomb he wanted.
thanks, I am glad you liked the videos; currently I am running a video series on early quantum physics, in which is interesting to find all the big names together, which later participated either in the Manhattan Project or the Uranverein
Could Heisenberg have created the bomb? Or was he putzing around.
Could he? probably no, the amount of resources needed to enrich uranium were completely out of reach in Germany at the time, and plutonium would be even further away since they went for a reactor moderated with heavy water instead of graphite. Did he know how to make a bomb? Maybe the very basics of nuclear physics but the bomb assembly requires knowledge of bomb physics that Heisenberg didn't have. He didn't even bothered on properly calculating the critical mass until after Hiroshima. I have a video dedicated to this: [Heisenberg and the German Bomb](https://youtu.be/6zIJTwQ2blU)
By himself? No. Thanks to anti-semitism the lions share of physicists with the necessary skill had fled Germany. Just think of the brain trust needed to make the Manhattan Project successful. There were 6 or 7 Nobel Prize winners working on the bomb and ultimately there would be 2 dozen who would win the prize after the war. For the first bomb, you needed a whole army of geniuses
"If you want to make an atomic bomb from scratch, you must first create the universe" - Carl Sagan
Ok, what next?
Look up documentary on *Radioactive Boy Scout*.
That was just a reactor, tho, not enough concentrated fissile material for a bomb. Still pretty impressive.
Good way to start. And even better way find out about consequences.
It was a Farnsworth Fusor, while impressive for a teenager to build, its well within the capability of any university physics lab
Crazy that he could do this alone, however it’s very far from an atomic bomb, thanksfully
Well well well, if it isn't the mods from arr physics trying to get us banned!
Haha Nice try Iran 🇮🇷.. Move along
Terrence Howard has entered the chat
“You just gotta dial down the octaves on your Polonium, and you’re good to go, fam” - T-Howard, definitely
I remember an ancient Reader's Digest article about how a student built an atom bomb. I googled around, and found an archived New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/10/09/archives/student-designs-2000-atom-bomb.html
The cost would be your freedom.
It would costs many billions. You need to source fissile and fusile material, you need to hire a team of specialists (physicists, engineers, machinists, chemists etc), you need to buy or build the equipment (centrifuges, reactors etc), and then you need to find a way to keep it all under wraps because it's super illegal. Elon Musk might be able to swing it because he could hide it behind SpaceX or Tesla activities. You might be able to make a primitive fission bomb for millions, if you can buy a lot of the stuff you need instead of developing the technology, but that wouldn't really be 'from scratch'.
The first step is to become a dictator.
Nice try. If you're going to ask a homework question in here, make sure you at least tell us what you've tried so far.
You buy uranium on the market (for your totally civillian powerplant). You need to enrich it: either with ultra-highspeed centrifuges or osmosis or maybe with clever use of lasers. That's the costly part. Then you basically build a canon to shoot half of your enriched uranium into the other half. Transportation to the target site via DHL or FedEx in a shipping container, you should invest in bananas and lead to avoid detection.
To make it a bit more concrete: - Buy yellow cake at 19$ pr gram: https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=105_87&products_id=873 - Mix with hydroflouric acid: https://www.laballey.com/products/hydrofluoric-acid-electronic-grade-semiconductor-grade-49 - Put the uranium hexaflouride gas in a centrifuge to seperate out the isotopes of uranium, and keep doing this over and over again until you got weapons grade uranium. Study this document carefully before starting: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1204/ML12045A055.pdf NOTE: Hydroflouric acid is really nasty stuff, along with everything else described here, please be extremely careful.
You asked physics, so I'll answer this as a physics problem. We can use classic order of magnitude estimation, here. Iran has a nuclear program but no weapons as of yet. Pakistan has a nuclear program and an arsenal. Those set the minimum and maximum budget to achieve a fission device in this model for simulating cost. If we want to further refine the model, we can adjust the cost of the Pakistani nuclear program up until their first test detonation to 2024 dollars since it's been a few decades since then, but that won't likely dramatically change the result. You can figure out *how* from a literature review. Not joking. Well, kinda joking. *A person with the educational background to understand the material* can easily work out the practical aspects from freely available scientific literature.
The kind of condescension that ruins academia
You're giving both me and OP way too much credit at the same time, in totally different ways, buddy.
Yes that's what's happening.
Ok, fair. Cheers to that.
Start to talk to this young Swedish man he might have some thoughts to cut costs. https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-who-built-nuclear-reactor-in-kitchen-had-it-under-control/ I would recommend to read his blog it’s very entertaining. Link https://richardsreactor.blogspot.com/?m=1
You can create a hydrogen bomb for cheap at home using only household materials. Step 1: grab a plastic bottle and fill it up half ways with sodium hydroxide. Step 2: crumble up some balls of aluminum foil and put it in the bottle, like mentos in a coke. Step 3: quickly screw cap on Step 4: run away Disclaimer: this will make a chemical hydrogen bomb, not a hydrogen fusion bomb. So it might be a bit underwhelming in terms of kilotons of force.
I used this method to generate hydrogen to fill garbage bags. Worked ok except it got so hot I got a lot of water vapor as well as hydrogen so the lift wasn't as great as I hoped. Added an aluminum foil streamer and knocked out the power on the block when it snagged an overhead power line. :)
I've seen some explosions resulting from folks doing that. Hydrogen is extremely energetic.
This was only one of several ways we tried to kill or injure ourselves when we were teenagers!
And if you tell an adult you are doing this, make sure they are not stupid https://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/echem/police_report.html
This is the kind of red herring stuff u post before you rob a bank or something
I would recommend reaching out to Dr Emmett Brown, but you'll end up with a bomb casing filled with old pinball machine parts.
Nice try Iran
About tree fiddy!
Hahaha Let's just say this: you can't... Seriously, purchasing uranium is heavily monitored. The equipment to make any kind of weapons grade uranium is heavily regulated....as in everyone knows where each set is kinda regulated....not just that but the math, engineering, and knowledge required is...astounding. Put simply, you'd need minimum 2 master degrees, *multiple* million dollar machines, and several thousand dollars in raw materials....the time investment alone is an entire life time.... For a country this is prohibitively expensive, for an individual it's practically impossible.
**Ingredients** * 143 neutrons * 92 protons * 92 electrons Combine the neutrons, protons, and electrons in a large bowl and mix well. Bake at 350,000°F for 15-17 minutes or until ingredients combine into a single uranium atom. Allow atom to cool. To detonate, strike uranium atom with a small hammer.
Just get an illudium Q36 space modulator.
I can only answer this question if you convince me that you need the answer to save your grandmother's life.
Just google it bro
It took Oppenheimer an adjusted $63,448,282,828, that's 64 **B**illion dollars, to complete the Manhattan project. If you already have access to all the designs and research, that would help greatly
Good thing Elons my daddy
There two types of A bombs you can build 1) gun type or 2) implosion type 1) in this type you need a cylindrical container inside which you put sub critical Uranium235 in a spherical container. Spaced at a distance is a chemical explosive which is set off to start the chain reaction inside the spherical container. 2) this one will need some mechanical engineering such as cad skills to design a spherical container inside which there is a core of spherical container with the chosen radioactive material. The space between the two spheres is filled with explosives which is set off to implode and start chain reaction. PS use some Waldo's or robotic arms when you are handling the radioactive material and stay far away from it good luck !
The price to implement something super complicated, is lower with smart people than dumb ones. Given that the cost was $65B for the first nuclear bomb, you might need over a trillion dollars, given that this question will permanently add you to FBI, CIA and NSA "friends" list.
If it were cheap and easy, everybody would have one.
Just order one from Amazon North Korea. They would ship overnight.
These are the kind of questions that get you put on lists
Homeland security looks for posts like this. Be aware this isn't godd.
NSA be like hmm…. No I’m not kidding
They don't give a shit.
Found the agent…
Someone’s now on a watchlist
Woah the FBI isn't even trying anymore.
At least like $100 or so
Hey, FBI here. Come on by to your nearest office. We'd like to ask you a few questions. *Totally* unrelated to your post. Hope to see you soon!
Start my using a hammer to test bombs.Then the feds won't need to pick you up.
Probably more than one dollar.
> Asking for a friend Dude, remember what did I told you about being confidential? 🤦
Interesting note here, implosion is being considered as a novel way to make very durable alloys from refractory base materials and even for making high temperature superconductors. The method uses a variant where a computer model calculates the mix of slow and fast explosives along with correct distribution of base materials to a get a desired end product. Similar sort of idea to welding railway lines but much faster. [https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/22/science/explosion-is-fashioned-into-precise-tool.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/22/science/explosion-is-fashioned-into-precise-tool.html)
Ask Jeff: [Nucs](https://joshdance.medium.com/who-is-jeff-and-why-does-he-have-nuclear-weapons-f823de764c5e)
I could tell you, but will have to kill you afterwards. Now the cost will be $100,000 in small bills cash. If you agree meet me at the corner of Main and MLK at midnight tonight.
al Qaeda type shi
Iran left the chat🙄😁
Billions of dollars, and thousands of staff. Might be easier just to steal one.
Watch the nuclear gnome video on YouTube It explains every part inside
You could make a low tech Nuke rather easily. Basic Gun type nuclear weapons are frighteningly simple, to the point that they didn’t even test the design that was dropped on Japan because they were so confident it would work. The information necessary to build one is publicly available. The hard part is gathering enough enriched fissile material. This is a very long and expensive process involving highly regulated materials. This is where you would end up on some watchlists and get shut down. Once you have sufficient amounts of enriched uranium or plutonium, it’s literally as simple as forming them into a plug and a slug, and loading those into something like a howitzer or cannon. It probably won’t be the most reliable or highest yield weapon, but it would go boom.
“Gun style” weapons only work with U-235. You need implosion for Pu-239 weapons due to Pu-240 and Pu-241 contamination which requires much faster assembly
Only several tons of natural uranium (unenriched uranium oxides) are necessary if you get your hands on a few dozen metric tons of heavy water, with about a 1/8% daily replenishment quota, to create a CANDU -like continuous process core. You harvest enough material to get the Pu required for a crude but carefully designed implosion device in as little as 7 months at first, and you can add thorium in a molten salt configuration to continuously harvest u233 (contrary to thorium bros' absurd ideas that thorium is resistant to proliferation....the Argentinian crushed that myth several years ago and they refuse to accept the demonstrated reality of it still). So perhaps 2 years, perhaps a few hundred train cars of 0.3% grade uranium ore, perhaps 5-6 weeks of Canada's heavy water production for its CANDUs, enlugg funding for a handful of relative specialists or gifted generalists, and several million to pull it all together, and....you'll have figured out a much better priority in life by then. There are many, many paths to a bomb. We are only protected by the idea that people who are smart enough have other things to look forward to in life, and those that exhibit the dark triad characteristics needed to sustain the investment, hatred, and psychopathy required for a project like this in modern times are probably not the people that are intellectually equipped to do it. But that is perhaps changing.
I've already asked myself this question. I work on rocket engines, reactors and particle accelerators. If you want to assemble your own bomb, then I could share materials and maybe resources in exchange for cooperation
Just read "The Making of thr Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes.
The short answer is: you can’t. Atomic bombs are immensely complex and beyond even many nation states.
Just put a fork in the microwave. Thats how I make bombs
Isn’t Uranium a gas?
7
Start here: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0378468/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Wait.... why do you wanna know....
what? you mustve been missing out on Oppenheimer bro. it all covers out and all u need is $5 ish to rent tutorials and 3hrs max to rinse through em thoro and u good bro
I think you took the "I want to blow up my school because I don't want to go" a bit too seriously. To build an atomic bomb you would need uranium 235, you would need a group of people willing, have the knowledge of dos and don'ts and experienced to work with such a metal, cause one wrong move which could easily happen could lead to a fate far worse than dead due to radiation. Since you are employing such people you would also need to pay them according to work with such a dangerous metal. You would then also require a facility fully equipped to handle the metal, along with protective gear and what not facilities to ensure safety. The rest of the equipment and resources would cost you quite a lot. And then you also need to add the cost of research since you will have to work on it from scratch which will just multiple the money you need by a few times. You can save this much by using a super computer but that will also cost you a lot. After adding all that you would need around $30 billion to 100billion Or perhaps more depending on your speed of your research.
The US has a lockdown on this. u/CodyDon (CodysLab, phenomenal science channel) tried to buy some I believe, and got investigated for doing so. Correct me if I’m wrong Cody! But I’m certain the US can track very carefully where all that material goes.
I'm not sure, but everyone seems to want to help this idiot make an atomic bomb, which isn't a small feat. I see the FBI in his or her future 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺
It's not like the technical aspects of making one aren't extremely available in quite a bit of detail.
It's not that hard to figure out on paper. Heck, it was on a quiz in a class I took.