Remember the first atomic bomb to kill people was a howitzer barrel and two lumps of Uranium 235 (not even weapons grade) shot into each other.
What, precisely, do you mean by “not even weapons grade”? Do you have a source for this?
A truck driver as a hobby built a copy of Little Boy with public sources.
Little Boy was a nuclear weapon. From the NPR article, it sounds like truck driver John Coster-Mullen did not build a Uranium-235 core. A fission bomb without a Uranium-235 core is not a nuclear weapon.
“The hard part is creating the nuclear fuel. That requires a nation-state,” says.
Weapons grade is kind of a nebulous term. In the broadest sense it means anything isotopically pure enough to make a working bomb, and in that sense Little Boy obviously qualifies. However, standard enrichment for later uranium bombs is typically around 90%, and according to Wikipedia, Little Boy was around 80% average enrichment.
It is well known that once you have weapons-grade fissile material, building a crude bomb requires little more than a machine shop. Isotopic enrichment is historically slow and expensive (and hard to hide), but there could certainly be tricks not yet widely known…
What, precisely, do you mean by “not even weapons grade”? Do you have a source for this?
Little Boy was a nuclear weapon. From the NPR article, it sounds like truck driver John Coster-Mullen did not build a Uranium-235 core. A fission bomb without a Uranium-235 core is not a nuclear weapon.
Coster-Mullen reverse-engineered a nuke. Then he built a toy. He never built a nuke.
Weapons grade is kind of a nebulous term. In the broadest sense it means anything isotopically pure enough to make a working bomb, and in that sense Little Boy obviously qualifies. However, standard enrichment for later uranium bombs is typically around 90%, and according to Wikipedia, Little Boy was around 80% average enrichment.
It is well known that once you have weapons-grade fissile material, building a crude bomb requires little more than a machine shop. Isotopic enrichment is historically slow and expensive (and hard to hide), but there could certainly be tricks not yet widely known…