...it's amazing what you can do with a little plutonium or a small amount of U-235, add in a dash of deuterium salts (lithium deuteride), and voila, a new sun rise.
All kidding aside, this is a fascinating subject & the story of the Manhattan Project (the making of the first atomic bomb) is an incredible one, a story that seems to border on the miraculous. The miracle of the Manhattan Project was not the successful engineering of the bomb itself. The miracle that took place was the survival of the men who worked on that project because the way in which they had ignorantly mishandled the radioactive materials used to construct that device would seem to have required an act of Providence for them to succeed and not have perished of radiation poisoning.
It's interesting seeing those photos of our nuclear arsenal, an arsenal that has not changed much over the years. In fact we just finished dismantling the last of our B53/W53 bombs, (the largest of our bombs), on Oct. 25th, 2011, not that very long ago.
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