Production of Nuclear Weapons

Marcus Betzer

Mr. Blank

Chemistry

15 May 2014

Production of Nuclear Weapons

The first two atomic bombs were used in World War II. Nuclear weapons have been reproduced and improved since the first uranium and plutonium bomb. It isn’t an easy task to make these bombs, especially back in the 1940s. It took many smart men to figure out how an atomic bomb works and how it can be made. Some of the main men were famous scientists, such as Einstein and Fermi. These brilliant men figured out how to make an atomic bomb and helped the United States win World War II over the Japanese. Making these atomic bombs wasn’t easy; to make one, they needed to go through a long, hard process.

The first atomic bomb to be made was a uranium bomb. The first step to make a uranium bomb is to obtain enough uranium that is highly enriched to over 90% U-235. Natural uranium is only 0.7% U-235 so the enrichment stage is a difficult task. To get enriched uranium, you have to diffuse uranium hexafluoride through a long pathway of absorbent material. Once the required mass is obtained, it must be kept in two or more pieces until the moment of detonation. Then you need to force together the energy that is released from the nuclear fission of uranium 235 quickly enough to form a critical mass. This energy also has to be forced together to form a rapid, uncontrolled fission chain reaction. These two things need to be forced together quickly and in a way that the generation time for fission is extremely short. Generation time is the average time for a neutron emitted in one fission to cause another fission. This leads to an almost immediate buildup of the chain reaction which then creates a powerful explosion before pieces can fly apart.

The second atomic bomb that was made was a plutonium bomb. A plutonium bomb is made basically the same way a uranium bomb is made, except it is a little more sophisticated in design. A plutonium bomb uses a spherical implosion lens...