Today we’re making nuclear bombs in just three, easy, legal* steps.

(For legal reasons, this is all for informational purposes, we don’t condone or endorse the creation of nuclear weapons or illegal bombs, - love, Ashton).

Step One: You need powerful conventional explosives or a gun-type assembly.

The gun-type assembly method primarily uses a conventional explosive propellant to rapidly fire a subcritical piece of uranium-235 into another subcritical piece.

Mechanism: A high-explosive charge (acting as a propellant, similar to a cannon) accelerates a uranium-235 "bullet" down a barrel to quickly collide with a uranium-235 "target."

Purpose of Explosive: The explosive is used for the propulsion to bring the two pieces together, not for compression of the metal itself. The resulting combined mass is supercritical and initiates the chain reaction.

Fissile Material: This method is simpler and was used for uranium-235 (highly enriched uranium or HEU). Plutonium-239 is unsuitable for this design because its higher rate of spontaneous neutron emission would cause the chain reaction to start too early ("fizzle") before the full mass is assembled.

And then for your explosives:

The implosion method uses carefully shaped conventional high explosives to compress the fissile core.

Mechanism: A spherical shell of specially designed high explosives, called an explosive lens (or explosive lenses), surrounds a subcritical core ("pit") of fissile material. When detonated precisely and simultaneously, the explosives create an inward-moving, spherical shock wave that uniformly compresses the core.

Explosive Type: This method requires conventional high explosives engineered for high-precision, symmetrical detonation. The explosives compress the fissile material, dramatically increasing its density, which effectively reduces the critical mass and transitions the core to a supercritical state.

Fissile Material: The implosion design was a necessity for plutonium-239 because it must be assembled much faster than the gun-type to prevent a pre-detonation. However, it can also be used with uranium-235 or a composite core of both materials. Using implosion for U-235 allows for a more efficient weapon that requires less fissile material than the gun-type design.

Second Two (this is the longest step): You need to obtain the Uranium-235, this is what can produce nuclear power. Natural Uranium is made up of two isotopes, U-235 making up approximately 0.7% & U-238 making up approximately 99.3% of uranium.

Step Three. Grab your nuclear artillery shell or casing. Now you have 25 Kilograms of U-235 or 8 kilograms of Plutonium-239. So you need a nuclear device to lay your fissible material and explosives or gun type-assembly propeller in to achieve your nuclear fission chain reaction. You need to compress this material to achieve your chain reaction at a powerful enough threshold for implosion so you don’t just melt the uranium. How this crazy chain reaction works is when a free neutron strikes a fissile nucleus (like uranium-235), causing it to split and release energy and more neutrons.

The complete fission of 1 kilogram of uranium-235 is equivalent to about 17.5 kilotons of TNT. So if you calculate the math you’ll have 437.5 kilotons of TNT worth of energy to explode.

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