Nuclear Thread - 4

[gangajal]

The implication of the absence of any S1 crater is that the S1 device yield was less than the 8 kt yield of the Pokhran 1 device. So the boosted fission trigger worked to some extent. We don't know for sure of the planned yield of the boosted fission trigger. Let us assume that the boosted fission trigger was planned at a 15 kt yield, i.e., one-third of the 45 kt S1 device. So if the boosted fission trigger yielded less than 8 kts, then that would imply that the boosted trigger worked at about 50 % efficiency. If the boosted fission trigger yield was supposed to be 25 kt then the efficiency of the actual boosted trigger was only 30 %. That is not a bad first effort.

The problem of using a LiD layer on top of the plutonium core is that when the whole thing is compressed, the LiD will get mixed with the plutonium. That would reduce the purity of the Plutonium and thus lower the temperature and cause less LiD to fuse. Less fusion means the fission process will be boosted less than the theoretical expectation. Nevertheless I would suggest that one could take the S1 boosted fission trigger as a reference and refine the software and get a better boosted fission device. Moreover they could over-design and use twice more Plutonium than is necessary for a particular yield. So a fairly reliable boosted fission device of about 100 kt is still possible although it will be inefficient, i.e. it will weigh more.

What Santhanam is really revealing is the utter failure of the second stage which did not work at all. I noticed that BARC is working in their Indore Center on increasing their knowledge of high intensity laser-matter interaction by compressing matter with a commercial 10 tera watt laser . So in theory they could now design a better 2-stage device where the second stage would possibly work at least with some efficiency. However, testing would be needed to be sure about the yield of the device.