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To: Red Badger

No, it's not that easy with plutonium; the design of plutonium device is not trivial. The nuclear characteristics of plutonium make it prone to pre-detonation (the chain reaction gets going before the optimum instant, with a decrease in the device's yield). The Manhattan Project had a great deal of difficulty in solving how to design the plutonium devices, which were used at Alomogordo and Nagasaki.


25 posted on 07/21/2005 12:39:19 PM PDT by bagman (We're all Britons now!)
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To: bagman
No, it's not that easy with plutonium; the design of plutonium device is not trivial. The nuclear characteristics of plutonium make it prone to pre-detonation (the chain reaction gets going before the optimum instant, with a decrease in the device's yield). The Manhattan Project had a great deal of difficulty in solving how to design the plutonium devices, which were used at Alomogordo and Nagasaki.

Was pre-detonation the reason that plutonium was deemed unsuitable for gun-type weapons?

31 posted on 07/21/2005 1:02:19 PM PDT by Logophile
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