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Summary

Description A number of the fission bomb assembly methods proposed during the summer conference on bomb design held at UC Berkeley by Robert Oppenheimer in 1942 during the Manhattan Project. These drawings are taken from the "Los Alamos Primer" — Los Alamos Report LA-1 (declassified 1965) — and were created in 1943 by Robert Serber.
Date
Source Excerpt from File:Los_Alamos_Primer.pdf
Author Robert Serber
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It depicts (from top to bottom): 1. shooting a "cylindrical plug" into a sphere of "active material and some tamper"; 2. a "well tamped spheroid"; 3. pieces "mounted on a ring" with explosive material distributed around the ring, which when fired "the pieces would be blown inward to form a sphere"; 4. an "autocatalytic method" where the "active material is disposed in a hollow shell" with the hope of the reaction propagating inward (and thus improving its efficiency as it exploded); 5. another "autocatalytic method" whereby active material is contains "enough boron to make the mass just critical", and by adding more active material a reaction would start which would, as it proceeded, compress the boron and decrease its effectiveness at absorbing neutrons and thus increase the efficiency of the reaction. (Note that #4 and #5 were considered fairly speculative even in 1943 and were eventually disproven as feasible designs.)

Licensing

© This image comes from Los Alamos National Laboratory, a national laboratory privately operated under contract from the United States Department of Energy by Los Alamos National Security, LLC between October 1, 2007 and October 31, 2018. LANL allowed anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted. LANL requires the following text be used when crediting images to it: (link)

Unless otherwise indicated, this information has been authored by an employee or employees of the Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has rights to use, reproduce, and distribute this information. The public may copy and use this information without charge, provided that this Notice and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. Neither the Government nor LANS makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any liability or responsibility for the use of this information.

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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current00:45, 23 March 2006Thumbnail for version as of 00:45, 23 March 2006440 × 900 (26 KB)Fastfission~commonswikiadd boron bubble
00:34, 23 March 2006Thumbnail for version as of 00:34, 23 March 2006440 × 702 (20 KB)Fastfission~commonswikiA number of the fission bomb assembly methods proposed during the summer conference on bomb design held at UC Berkeley by Robert Oppenheimer in 1942 during the Manhattan Project. These drawings are taken from the "Los Alamos Primer" — Los Al

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