A Hydrogen Bomb by any other name | Hacker News Reader

A Hydrogen Bomb by any other name

newyorker.com

101 pointscaf34 comments

It would have been nice if this article had some diagrams of the respective bomb designs. I was having trouble trying to piece together where components were and had to do a few Google Image searches to follow along.

The relevant Wikipedia page has some decent diagrams - from the original Ivy Mike Sausage style cylindrical secondaries through to very modern designs like the W88:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

I can also recommend "Dark Sun" by Richard Rhodes for more details.

http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/ has quite a bit of detail, especially about fusion-boosted weapons and Tellar-Ulam weapons.

I have to wonder whether China is involved in any way here. Would they be able to use North Korea as a cover to test their weapons?

It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test.

It would be outright ludicrous for China to imagine that they could use North Korea to test advanced weaponry without anyone tracing it back to them.

Besides China, there are other sources North Korea can have used to aquiver this technology. Both North Korea, Libya, Iran and China did get help developing nuclear technology from a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist often regarded as the fonder of the Pakistani nuclear enrichment program.

He again acquired the technology in Europe when working for Urenco, a nuclear fuel company.

The whole Q.A Khan affair is quit a fascinating story actually.

Some more information on http://world.time.com/2011/07/07/a-q-khans-revelations-did-p... and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan

I did also see a very good documentary about this, but I can not find it online right now.

Edit: Here is the BBC documentary about Khans dealings in nuclear secrets: http://www.unewstv.com/6821/bbc-documentary-on-dr-abdul-qade... . Stranger then fiction, it has a plot like a top thriller movie.

I wouldn't be surprised if the nuclear physicist in The Dictator was based on Khan. He sounds like he's proud of his work and I admire that, moral judgements on nuclear weapons aside.

"It seems suspicious when a D student aces a big test."

More like when a D student marks their own test, scores 5% and announces they've passed.

But the current situation is more analogous to a D student getting a D on the big test. Their first nuclear tests were so weak that there was debate over what they even were, and they almost certainly did not represent a successful test of the intended bomb yield. This latest test was pretty definitely nuclear, but if it was a fusion weapon as claimed then it was again a major failure.

I'm not sure if any other nuclear weapons state has had such a string of failures. Both the US and USSR had successful full yields for their tests of their first fission and fusion bombs. China's first fusion weapon test yielded over 3 megatons.

North Korea's test yielded probably under 10 kilotons, and they're going around bragging about an H-bomb. I'd say that deserves a D, at best.

Is China supposed to be the D student? They're the third in class, pissed that they're neither valedictorian nor salutatorian. Definitely not the D student.

And it's not North Korea either, as they're F- students. I still don't understand the big deal here, they fizzle-yielded their first two tests, and their claims of an H-bomb are ridiculous. They don't have the infrastructure, expertise, or materials to make Ulam-Tellers. This is bad propaganda from crackpot murderers.

Why would China need North Korea to test its nuclear weapons? They have a long history of nuclear tests and are a member of the club so to speak. They never did the large tests that the Soviet Union or the US did, but I don't see why they would. No one needs a 1+ megaton warhead if you have an accurate delivery system.

Interesting how one can write an article about thermonuclear bombs and calls them hydrogen bombs all along.

Aren't they the same thing?

Not precisely. Most of the energy of a thermonuclear bomb comes from fission, the fusion reaction mostly serves as a booster for neutron flux, escalating the fission reaction further than in a pure fission weapon. Even more so when the enclosing capsule (The tamper) is made of U238 instead of lead, as the high neutron flux leads to fission in the tamper (The Tsar Bomb would have had a yield of 100MT instead of 50MT had it's tamper not been replaced by lead, an intentional restriction).

A proper hydrogen bomb would be purely fusion.

> A proper hydrogen bomb would be purely fusion.

But a fission device is used to get the fusion reaction going in all practical designs, I think.

The fine article describes the design of the US's actual hydrogen bombs as follows - I don't know if you'd count them as 'proper':

> So there are really three stages of nuclear reaction in such a bomb: the primary (fission), the secondary’s internal fuel (fusion), and the secondary’s casing (more fission).

The term "hydrogen bomb" has been used to describe thermonuclear bombs more or less since they were invented. Given that background, it makes no sense to me to insist that a "proper hydrogen bomb" would refer to a pure fusion design, especially since nobody has ever come anywhere close to figuring out how to build such a thing.

You can't really complain when a article in the non-specialist press uses popular rather than specialist terminology. "Hydrogen bomb" is a term that's been bandied about for about as long as nuclear bombs have existed and the article properly points out that there isn't actually any clear definition of the term so I don't think we have anything to complain about.

The New Yorker has many luxuries, but not that which lets them be ignorant. There's an old saying about the New Yorker's fact checking, that if they were to do a story about the Empire State Building, the first thing they would do is dispatch someone to see if it were still standing.

All it takes is just enough ignorant simplicity and a dash of sensationalism to go from New Yorker to New York Post.

There's nothing ignorant about using the term "hydrogen bomb." It's a perfectly acceptable and relatively common term used to describe what they're using it to describe.

The only thing that's ignorant here is commenters insisting that "hydrogen bomb" is somehow wrong.

I understand that, I merely intended to demonstrate that ignorant simplicity is not a preferred quality of the New Yorker among its readers.

Why is that a point worth making in reply to a comment that is merely defending simplicity, not ignorant simplicity?

To separate the criticisms regarding simplicity generally and the nomenclature specifically. I was downvoted for what I said and I need imaginary internet points to feel like my life has meaning.

From what I can tell, you were downvoted because you either didn't read and understand the article, or you didn't understand the context in which it was written.

1. N. Korea claims it has a "Hydrogen Bomb".

2. The U.S. and others respond skeptically.

3. The New Yorker points out that the U.S. has made this response before (earlier in the cold war) and that the term itself has some ambiguity because of the different types of weapons that could have a fusion based element. Readers learn more about cold war history and the differences in different types of atomic weapons.

4. You make a snide comment that doesn't seem to register the entire context of all this, and get downvoted.

If the New Yorker had used the term uncritically then I would agree with you. But they didn't, they carefully laid out why the term isn't clearly defined and hence why it isn't in common use among professionals. That's exactly what I would hope any publication would do when a term has currency in the news but the reading public might not know why it's a flawed term.

No mention of Tsar bomba in the article about history of nuclear bombs?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

There was no argument about nomenclature by then - at that point the Soviets were well understood to have Teller-Ulam style devices (as the article says, the Soviets built their first one in '55).

That's not the point of the article at all. Why you would want it to be there?

Who the hell cares if it is just a "regular" a-bomb instead of an h-bomb.

Can you imagine if it was Iran with "just" a regular a-bomb?

Millions of people in North Korea are starving, eating bark off trees and are horribly repressed. Their nutrition is so bad their children grow far shorter than than their southern counterparts.

It's one of the worst abuses of a human population in the world that is completely documented - yet the world shrugs and says "what can we do?"

Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before they even had their first scientist write the first formulas for nuclear power.

Imagine if they were next to Israel, how fast we'd sell them the jets and bombs to take out the reactors while they were being built.

But nope, we don't give a damn.

> Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before [...]

Except, China.

> Imagine if they had oil and how fast we'd invade before they even had their first scientist write the first formulas for nuclear power.

> Imagine if they were next to Israel, how fast we'd sell them the jets and bombs to take out the reactors while they were being built.

> But nope, we don't give a damn.

This is not even remotely true. The reason nobody invades North Korea is because the DPRK holds millions of people hostage. I'm not just talking about their own citizens. Any invasion of North Korea would certainly result in the artillery bombardment of Seoul. It would likely also result in a nuclear exchange. The death toll would be higher than any conflict since WWII.

The US definitely gives a damn. It gives food to North Korea and military aid to South Korea. I'm sure US officials would love for the Kim regime to fall, but there's simply no way to make that happen without risking millions of innocent lives.

> I'm sure US officials would love for the Kim regime to fall

That's debatable given the regional instability that would cause. This is one of the reasons the US donates food.

Also, North Korea is under the protection of China. Partly because they're allies (sorta), and partly because China just doesn't want people messing around near it. One might recall the last time we tried to take over North Korea. Once we got close enough to the Chinese border to make them uncomfortable, a million or so Chinese troops poured over and made life somewhat difficult for the US and their allies.

And that was 1950s China, fresh out of a massive civil war and struggling to get by. 2016 China is far more powerful.

If you want to complain about how nobody does anything about North Korea, look at who's protecting them to see why that is.

China likely also doesn't want the resulting 25 million refugees heading in their direction.

Your thesis fails hard: why haven't we invaded Iran yet? Practically next door to Israel, and sitting on sufficiently enough oil to be a major player in OPEC and even to cause Britain to preemptively invade the Ottomans in WWI for fear of losing access to those oil fields (which the Ottomans never really cared to threaten in the first place, as it turned out).

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