Yesterday’s Tom Friedman column focuses not on the flatness of the earth but on the prospects for massive energy innovation that will completely eliminate our dependence on tinpot dictatorships. And maybe make the world a bit flatter.
The incredible innovation Friedman discusses is inertial confinement fusion. Take a peppercorn-sized piece of deuterium and tritium, compress it with 192 lasers – Austin Powers finger quote marks optional – and voila: you create something hotter than the core of collapsing supernova and end up with helium and an enormous amount of energy. Here is the diagram – do not be scared by the word “thermonuclear”:
Friedman imagines a bunch of these reactors around the country, glowing lasers bouncing everywhere. And, assuming it is possible to get more energy out of the project than goes into it, it would be nice to power the country without cutting checks to the Saudis or tearing up the mountains of West Virginia and the polar ice caps. Would be extra nice to have nuclear power without creating waste that will be radioactive for longer than humans have been a recognizable species.
Livermore Labs’ website cannot resist a grandiose statement about its lasers:
Only three places in the space and time of our universe have ever produced anything close to these conditions: the Big Bang, when the universe was born in a primordial fireball; the interiors of stars and planets; and thermonuclear weapons.
It’s the third one that worries me. Most of the waste products of fusion can probably be dealt with – the X-rays generated by the outer shell of the target, whatever nasty stuff happens to the container, etc. But one byproduct that is incredibly difficult to handle is the dramatic increase in the number of people who have a good practical knowledge of thermonuclear reactions.
The basic idea of how to build a hydrogen bomb has been available to interested parties for quite a while. Howard Morland’s attempt to explain the inner workings became a court case (United States v. Progressive), and Greenpeace later got its hands on some British government H-Bomb for Dummies schematic:
There is even a former truck driver who has been on a decade-long quest to publish the details of the Hiroshima bomb.
However, there is more to building a bomb than having a vague understanding of how the thing works. Astonishingly, the bomb appears to have been invented only once; all existing atomic weapons are derivatives of the American 1945 design. The primary mechanism of bomb acquisition is espionage, and it is far easier to steal a scientist than to steal a working bomb (despite our best efforts to lose weapons). Do we really want to create more Abdul Khans?
Meh. I don’t think this is a serious issue, because the NIF technology is not really applicable to building new bombs. The argument you make would be better used against something like Rumsfeld’s RNEP nuclear bunker-buster project. Livermore’s overheated rhetoric aside, the only real technical similarity between NIF and a bomb is the idea of squishing stuff together real tight, which as you say is not a secret trick. If I was a hardworking Saudi who gave a terrorist 4 billion dollars, and he used the money to create a petawatt laser array the size of a large building, I would be pissed off. Even the idea of terrorists or rogue states using fusion bombs at all is pretty far-fetched– step one in building such a weapon is to build a fission bomb to ignite it, so why not take that (much smaller and cheaper) subproject straight to Lincoln Center? It’s true that NIF will be used to study the high-temperature equation of state of Pu and U, and this knowledge will certainly be applicable to the stockpile stewardship program. But you don’t need to know those details to make a bomb. Teller and Ulam didn’t know that shit. They were keepin’ it real.
Teller and Ulam, and for that matter Oppenheimer and Fermi before them, got us the whole way from TNT to thermonuclear weapons in a decade without the benefit of the processing power of a pocket calculator.
But they were really, really good.
Assembling the world’s best scientists and keeping them working on the same bureaucratic project and preventing them from running off to catch butterflies or blab about what they were doing to our mortal enemies was a difficult task for the United States in the middle of a global war, and we were only partially successful. It is pretty well beyond the capacity of any non-nuclear state today, especially since the non-nuclear states today (except the former Axis countries) are largely defined by their lack of indigenous scientific talent. So any nation that tries to build a bomb today is forced to rely on a limited number of B-team scientists and whatever secrets those guys are able to walk out of the weapons programs of the countries that do have the bomb. Seems to me that keeping the number of scientists with a plausible angle to sell a bomb to a bare minimum is a good practice.
As for the strategic wisdom of building a fission-fusion bomb when a fission bomb is plenty scary, I would point to the fact that North Korea is actively engaged in a ballistic missile program, and you would think the more efficient way of getting a crude atomic bomb to LA would be to ship it in a cargo container well in advance (indeed, even if we intercepted the bomb we could never be sure we got the only one, and would probably be more scared than by any missile program whose progress we can easily follow along). Delusions of grandeur are an important component of any serious effort to be a rogue nation.
[...] And whoever keeps searching on Google for “hydrogen bomb schematic” and clicking here; it’s a bit creepy that a post no one seemed interested in at the time seems to find new [...]