quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
Sigfreund is correct, the Little Boy device was a gun-type atomic bomb. Note that the uranium "bullet" was hollow all the way through (the ultimate hollowpoint), and the target was a solid slug.

They were so confident that this design would work they never tested it! Hiroshima was the first and only time this design was used by the US. Trinity test in New Mexico was the first implosion weapon design tested.

quote:

Originally posted by mrw:
They were so confident that this design would work they never tested it!

Yes, I found that interesting when I read about it.

I’ve read several books about the atomic weapons projects and the spies who revealed our secrets to the Soviets and I still get a slow burn whenever I think about the espionage. Something like the “gun” design may have been so obvious that “anyone” could have figured it out—as was widely believed at the time—but there were countless other technical questions and problems that required some of the smartest minds in the world to solve. The US had those minds and other countries (other than some in the UK) generally didn’t.

Although it’s not mentioned much in the “Oh, it was inevitable and spying wasn’t so bad or important” Leftist literature, when rumors about the US nuclear weapons program started surfacing, Soviet scientists told Stalin that an atomic bomb was impossible. Some of them and members of their intelligence community initially believed that the rumors were disinformation designed to lead them into a huge project wasteful of their efforts and resources.

SL-1 event was also a screw up that could have been avoided.

On December 21, 1960, the reactor was shut down for scheduled maintenance, and the primary crew of operators left for the holidays. In the meantime, a maintenance crew of three operators took over at the facility. On January 3 at 9:01pm, as the reactor was being prepared to come back online, procedures required that the central control rod be manually withdrawn by a matter of inches. Specifically, the safe limit of extension was to be reached at 4.2 inches. However, the rod was instead extended approximately 20 inches. Since the control rods regulate the rate of the fission reaction by absorbing excess neutrons released by the U-235 atoms (with 2.4 released per atom on average) and maintaining a steady rate of neutrons allowed to cause new fission events (i.e. an effective neutron multiplication factor, or k-effective, of 1), the removal of the central rod past its safe limit caused the reactor to achieve prompt criticality. [2] Consequently, only four milliseconds later, enough heat was generated in the surrounding water to cause it to vaporize. This released an extremely concentrated amount of steam up from the reactor, causing the entire housing (weighing 26,000 lbs.) to jump 9.1 feet vertically, and for control rods and various other pieces of the assembly to be propelled upwards with great enough force to become lodged into the ceiling.

http://large.stanford.edu/cour...2017/ph241/berrios1/

As quoted by Arlington National Cemetary Records:

"3 January 1961: A reactor explosion (attributed by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission source to sabotage) at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls, Idaho, killed one navy technician and two army technicians, and released radioactivity "largely confined" (words of John A. McCone, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission) to the reactor building. The three men were killed as they moved fuel rods in a "routine" preparation for the reactor start-up. One technician was blown to the ceiling of the containment dome and impaled on a control rod. His body remained there until it was taken down six days later. The men were so heavily exposed to radiation that their hands had to be buried separately with other radioactive waste, and their bodies were interred in lead coffins."

This photograph shows the a truck carrying the radioactive corpse of a reactor operator from the SL-1 accident. The operator was impaled in the ceiling of the structure by a control rod. Once his body was freed from the control rod, it was caught in a special truck-mounted sling, then transferred to this truck. The extremely radioactive body is inside lead blocks stacked on the end of the truck to minimize the truck driver's radiation exposure.

http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm

quote:

Originally posted by PrinceAliFabulousHe:
The first time I read about that, the only thing I could think of was why some moron would be doing that test with a screwdrive and not a properly designed test fixture.

Seriously!!! At least use a rubber coated one...

A couple observations.

Somebody who is "highly intelligent" is not necessarily blessed with an abundance of common sense.

Incredible intelligence can also lead to incredible arrogance. "Hold my slide rule - I got this."

This is why there are warnings on my toaster oven that say "Do not submerge in water while plugged in."

I agree with Sig2340 and Tn226 - they did a LOT of stupid stuff back then.

I read a couple books on the subject recently. They were "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base" by Annie Jacobson, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, and "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser. If half of the stuff in there is true, I am utterly amazed we survived the 60s without one of the many US accidents leading to WWIII.

What's even more scary is my assumption that the US was a LOT more safety-conscious than the Soviets, and it makes me wonder how close the Sovs came to nuking themselves by accident. According to the Damascus Incident book (tells the story of the Titan complex in Arkansas that exploded, along with a narrative about nuclear weapons accidents and design flaws), many of our bombs were not failsafe. Meaning, under certain circumstances (such as a bomber crashing and burning with live nukes onboard, which happened more than I ever suspected) these bombs could have detonated to their full nuclear yield (instead of just the conventional explosives cooking off and scattering radioactive materials all over the place).

Another story (from Damascus, IIRC) was a guy conducting a tour of a West German air base. He stated there was a US jet parked on the runway with a live nuclear weapon loaded, with no guards or anybody else anywhere near the plane. He said a rogue pilot could have jumped into that plane, took off, and nuked East Berlin (or Bonn, or Paris, or London) before anybody could have stopped him.

I also read about Area 25, where they purposefully allowed that reactor to overheat and explode. That radioactive mess is still there. They also detonated the explosives on a live nuke to see what would happen. There was no nuclear detonation, but several hundred pounds of conventional explosives cooked off and scattered the plutonium core to the 4 winds (a dirty bomb). They had built streets, houses, etc, and parked cars there to see how hard it would be to clean it all up. It turns out, the answer is "Very." They just left it all there in the desert. The NEST (Nuclear Emergency Support Teams) people apparently went back there shortly after 9/11 to practice decontaminating areas affected by a dirty bomb, 'just in case.' That area is still lethally 'hot' and should remain so for the next couple millennia. Oh, and somebody actually stole a 1950 Ford pickup from that site (nobody knows exactly when - they just discovered it was missing at some point). Whoever stole that vehicle and/or restored it likely developed a variety of cancers over the years.

The Brits developed an early hydrogen bomb, IIRC, that had to be filled with metal pellets and stored upside-down in order to prevent a fire from causing a nuclear detonation (we wouldn't share our nuke secrets with the Brits at first, so they had to re-create the wheel and build their own).

So yeah, "intelligence" has nothing to do with "common sense."

My lifetime observation of these exact operations is the dramatic arrogance that can occur with extreme intellect and education.

One of my USAF assignments in the 1960s was to Johnston Island in the mid-Pacific. There were 2 launch pads there for Thor booster rockets, which our unit would use to fly to and destroy enemy satellites (never done, but we had proved it would work). Those pads had been originally built and used by other agencies to test high altitude nuclear bursts (one of which blacked out part of Hawaii by its EMP). There was an accident on one of the 2 pads that resulted in a "single-point" detonation of the warhead, and Plutonium was scattered all around. The contaminated soil was removed and the pad returned to use, but it was necessary to monitor the area and repaint items periodically to do so safely. (The radiation was blockable by coats of paint.)

flashguy

I do NOT think all of us where fools
Please if you can use your two brain cells
THE Date = we used what we had !! dammit
No body forced us to do anything !
Hollywood is all Bullshit!
look at the asses on the news to day
Only two where killed ( because they where stupid!)
All that bullshit that you have access to - was
written by people that heard it second or third hand!
I do agree that there is a fine line between line a genius an a complete nut!
hell I was president of the chess club
( guess nobody else wanted the job)
had a genius that could beat any two of us without seeing the chess board
BUT could not figure out how too get in a car.
let alone how or where to go to eat or for that matter shit
remember ther only about two hundred of us ,that really know what was going on , and i in my old age was a fool to disclose that in my note to the Waukehsha Freeman news paper
Now I pay th price - I am required to serve jury duty at my age and medical condition,
yes i do have medical excuses and lawyer
but what will happen the cops will do their duty an take me to jail ( ask any cop on this board)
the question to myself , is do I fight the cops or do i die in jail
ask any cop who has the power in a court and they say the Clerks!!
they will bury my age and i will be come a non event
yes the commies control the wis, courts
((believe the law an your a fool !!))
is's over and you better accept it.
You free men are monitored every second of every day
( again ask any cop about tripwire (FBI) ) let them deniy it and there liars.
Hell have enough cops or whatever in my family to know they will say there only doing there duty
But remember EVERY Jew that was rounded up in Poland WWII was turned in and loaded into box cars by COPs no other help was needed..

after this year
you'll never hear
Merry Christmas
God Bless America

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:
I was part of a team that taught a class a Los Alamos in 1992. The Lab laid on a full tour with a docent who'd been there from 1943 to when we got there.

His stories left me totally convinced those people were stark raving stupid.

Take the atomic reactor powered rocket. They built one, and after proving the concept, decided it was important to see what happened if there was a catastrophic coolant failure. So off to the Nevada Test Site, whereupon they take out the coolant, fire it up, and BOOM! plutonium, uranium, and rocket bits everywhere.

I pointed out that they already knew what happened with a reactor suffered a catastrophic coolant loss. So why on Earth did they do this?

His answer was "We wanted to see what happened."

Okay.

The tour of the Hanford Reservation in Washington was even scarier.

Yeah, and I grew up not far from there, and as I recall we were on the down wind side, too. Was heavy into CBR when I was in the army and some of what we learned was kind of chilling, to say the least.

One such fact was given a scaling wind of 15 MPH and a 1 megaton bomb on Frankurt, the 100 percent death range was more than a 100 miles.

I still have the calculators floating around my desk area.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:

I’m with ya on that, Mister Monkey. Had me doing one of those ‘Rrrrrr?’ things.

quote:

Originally posted by clubleaf206:

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:

I’m with ya on that, Mister Monkey. Had me doing one of those ‘Rrrrrr?’ things.

Glad I'm not the only one.

Trying to read/comprehend that, I was sure ONE of us was having a stroke.

...

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:
Glad I'm not the only one.
Trying to read/comprehend that, I was sure ONE of us was having a stroke.

Just a little radiation exposure.
Maybe he has some stories to tell.