Maybe but that’s not what’s happening right now. And all that talk was in the 50’s(I think) when nuclear weapons were being built as fast as they could get the shit to make ‘em.
- Thread starter Lawless
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Doesn’t really work that way. Unless you develop an alternative technology, you have to have a critical mass of fissile material to start a nuclear explosion. This puts a minimum size on the bomb material. You can use less and make a dirty bomb, but not a nuke.
Edit: Now that I think about it, we have come full circle in this thread. NIF, the National Ignition Facility that is the experiment that reported getting breakeven to inspire this thread, was created to make mini nuclear explosions to study how to make bombs work more efficiently. NIF is an example of an alternative techonlogy to detonate a nuclear explosion. It’s much bigger and more cumbersome than a nuke. And doesn’t work as well.
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That's using last century's plans and designs.
About the same time you might possibly have working fusion reactors, folks might have figured out their 4th or greater generation nuclear weapons which will have the advantage of being able to be used without nearly as much worry as today's stuff and quite possibly not need all these huge facilities to refine and produce the materials.
It’s actuallly just using today’s physics. No critical mass = no nuclear chain reaction. No chain reaction, no fission explosion. No fission explosion, no fusion explosion. Unless you have some alternative method like gravity (not possible with less than stellar masses, aka not on Earth) or laser implosion (NIF) to get n*t*Tau over the Lawson criterion. If you have some other design that somehow gets around these fundamental physics limitations, please inform.
Lots of ideas are out there, just right now the science and technology can't make it work.
Much like... oh right working fusion reactors for producing commercial energy...
or working industrial scale thorium reactors...
It would most likely be easier to make working 4th gen nuclear weapons than it would be to have a stable vehicle scale fusion reactor.
The same principle behind igniting your fusion reactor is what would also make your weapon, the issue is of course scaling down to portable size.
Or there is the more far flung ideas about using more exotic states of matter which are not yet able to be produced in enough quantity for anything other than proof of existence.
Just as folks look at fusion reactors as the holy grail of solving your power needs, the same class of nuclear weapons are the holy grail of useful mega weapons.
Neither are getting solved anytime soon, but that isn't stopping folks from working hard on the science of them even if it won't produce results in their lifetimes.
