[HN Gopher] What if the Trinity test had failed?
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What if the Trinity test had failed?
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 72 points
Date : 2020-07-16 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)
| [deleted]
| dgrin91 wrote:
| What if this website fails because it got hugged to death?
| blibble wrote:
| there was a very early Sliders episode about exactly this!
|
| https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_World
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| They got the bit about nuclear power wrong though. Fission was
| discovered in Germany just before WWII, which is why Einstein
| (the real one) was concerned that the Germans might develop
| nuclear weapons first and advised the US to do it. At that
| point it wasn't obvious that a bomb was possible even if
| fission was, but even if it wasn't, the application of fission
| to power generation would still have been obvious.
|
| If anything they'd have probably had more nuclear power
| generation, because the proliferation risk wouldn't have been a
| concern and the scary association with city-destroying weapons
| wouldn't have been such a PR problem.
| trimbo wrote:
| > Einstein (the real one) was concerned that the Germans
| might develop nuclear weapons first and advised the US to do
| it.
|
| Leo Szilard had this realization, wrote the letter, and got
| Einstein to sign it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_.
| ..
| tobylane wrote:
| I really enjoyed the Manhattan series, which covered similar
| ground. Some reasonably accurate but dramatised scenes about
| viability of the bomb types and exploring how to get there,
| both physically and in maths.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_(TV_series)
| superkuh wrote:
| Sliders also predicted people going to bars without masks
| during a pandemic.
| panzagl wrote:
| Failed like didn't explode or failed like set the entire
| atmosphere on fire?
| RobRivera wrote:
| The published article annotated modes of failure with respect
| to the desired operational objective of a 5kton blast, 500 ton,
| various component failures, and their implications. It's
| written from a operational impact perspective on the war,
| Potsdam, and cold war implications.
| beervirus wrote:
| Read the article, but he's talking about failures as in not
| exploding (or exploding with significantly lower yield).
| OvidStavrica wrote:
| I think they refer to the failure mode where: Nothing happened
| for a day or two. All the experts travel to the location to try
| to understand what went wrong, in situ... and THEN the
| explosion occurs.
| iguy wrote:
| This really wasn't a plausible failure mode. They had many
| (9?) detonators which had to be very precisely simultaneous,
| and had done a lot of tests of those alone (this was cheap &
| easy). As long as just one of them worked, you would burn all
| the explosives (just not in the right order) and destroy the
| device.
| catalogia wrote:
| I'm sure they had some redundancy in the systems required
| to fire those detonators too, but how much?
| iguy wrote:
| Not sure how you would quantify this, but enough?
| Inventing detonators that worked fast enough (i.e. small
| enough error in firing time) was one of the challenges.
| They did a lot of tests of those explosive lenses. (32,
| not 9, of course.)
|
| The electronics to fire them would have comparatively
| easy to test well, and I'm sure they over-designed it
| all. I doubt that duplicating it would have made anything
| better.
| Animats wrote:
| Everyone involved was confident the gun-type bomb would work.
| They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close
| together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed
| several people at Los Alamos.
|
| The big worry was it going off prematurely. When the Enola Gay
| took off to drop the uranium bomb on Hiroshima, their orders were
| that if they had to turn back, dump the bomb in deep water. A
| billion dollars to the bottom of the sea. That was preferable to
| taking the chance of blowing the airfield on Tinian off the map
| if the B-29 had a fire on landing.
|
| Making enriched uranium was slow, but working. The gaseous-
| diffusion plant cascades were working, after months of startup.
| The second gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, K-27, opened in
| September 1945, a few weeks after the end of the war. If the war
| had dragged on, there would have been more uranium bombs.
| wtallis wrote:
| > They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close
| together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed
| several people at Los Alamos.
|
| I think the fatal criticality accidents at Los Alamos involved
| a single chunk of plutonium and neutron reflectors:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
| ZeljkoS wrote:
| The Demon core story is quite fascinating, I compiled several
| Wikipedia articles to construct the full narrative:
| https://svedic.org/history/demon-core
| refurb wrote:
| Exactly. I won't comment on the scientists confidence, but
| getting a chunk of plutonium to go critical isn't that hard.
|
| Getting it to go critical in a consistent way is hard. Slam
| two sub-critical pieces together with your hands and it will
| go critical then blow itself apart, going sub-critical.
| Little energy release and more just throwing plutonium
| around.
| hchz wrote:
| This same failure most recently occurred at Sarov in the late
| 90's, killing one. https://www-
| pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1106_scr.p...
| eunoia wrote:
| > They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close
| together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed
| several people at Los Alamos.
|
| I thought the Los Alamos demon core was plutonium?
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| It was.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
| ghaff wrote:
| >Everyone involved was confident the gun-type bomb would work.
|
| Yes. That's why the design of the Little Boy bomb carried by
| the Enola Gay was only "unit tested." That's not what the
| Trinity test tested. The uranium gun-type bomb dropped on
| Hiroshima was basically a backup plan in case the plutonium-
| implosion design--which was the primary focus of Los Alamos
| during the later part of the Manhattan Project--couldn't be
| made to work.
|
| And it was the plutonium-implosion design that was tested at
| Trinity. (And was the design dropped on Nagasaki.)
| HPsquared wrote:
| Site seems to be down. Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200716185116/http://blog.nucle...
| RangerScience wrote:
| This is a pretty fascinating exploration into what wasn't known
| about the bomb prior to the test, the range of expectations about
| what would happen, and the various things that the test results
| affected.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| A lot of people would have been very surprised if it had failed.
|
| The physics wasn't considered a mystery by then. Failure would
| have been caused by fixable engineering and design mistakes - or
| sabotage - not because the idea was unworkable.
|
| There _might_ have been some completely unexpected physics at
| scale. But given that nuclear reactors were already a thing, that
| would have been very surprising.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Trinity was a plutonium device. Reactors were uranium devices.
| Nobody was really sure if the plutonium implosion device would
| work - that's why they did the test; they were very sure that
| the uranium bullet device, that was used on Hiroshima without
| testing, would work.
| Donthatme wrote:
| I am not sure about this. There is a lot of physics other than
| nuclear going on (rad-hydro,hydrodynamics and atomic physics at
| HED, etc.)
| dllthomas wrote:
| > There might have been some completely unexpected physics at
| scale. But given that nuclear reactors were already a thing,
| that would have been very surprising.
|
| That sort of happened in a later test:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
|
| _" Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons of TNT, 2.5 times the
| predicted 6.0 megatons, due to unforeseen additional reactions
| involving lithium-7"_
| beervirus wrote:
| If your time tolerance is nanoseconds, the engineering is
| everything.
| missedthecue wrote:
| That's true with implosion but not gun type
| baud147258 wrote:
| Trinity was an implosion type bomb, so the required
| tolerances were tight
| beervirus wrote:
| Implosion is what we're talking about.
| mormegil wrote:
| But some people expected that: "The observers set up a betting
| pool on the results of the test. Edward Teller was the most
| optimistic, predicting 45 kilotons of TNT (190 TJ). [...]
| Others were less optimistic. Ramsey chose zero (a complete
| dud), Robert Oppenheimer chose 0.3 kilotons of TNT (1.3 TJ)
| [...]" (Wikipedia)
| tempestn wrote:
| That's true, but if you think about today, there are lot of
| things that are well understood by scientists and yet disputed
| by many politicians and members of the public. If the Trinity
| test had failed, it's not inconceivable it would have colored
| the leadership's perceptions of the feasibility of atomic bombs
| in general.
| plasticchris wrote:
| One of the most interesting stories about.. work life balance...
| was in Richard Rhodes' book
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb),
| about fixing imperfections in the high explosive castings with
| dental tools just before (I think it was the night before?) the
| test. Another source here:
| https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity3.pdf
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