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Nuclear weapons
Basic Physics
Fission Weapons
Criticality - subcritical - supercritical - prompt criticality - critcial insertion time - insertion (gun-type) method - spontaneous fission - implosion method Liquid drop model - superdeformation - hyperdeformation (put these in physics?) Th233 - U233 - U235 - U238 - Pu249 - Pu240 - transuranics Enrichment levels - enrichment methods - degradation - downblending Neutron sources - prompt neutrons - delayed neutrons
Fusion Weapons and Boosting
Delivery Systems
Missile Defense
- "Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems." R.L. Garwin and H.A. Bethe. Scientific American, Vol. 218, No. 3, pp. 21-31, March 1968.
- Missile Defense Agency, with garish Flash as of 2008.12.27.
See Also
- The Garwin Archive at FAS is awesome
- The National Nuclear Data Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory
- The NRDC maintains a nuclear data archive
Books
The following textbooks range from introductory to advanced material, and all require some basic physics and associated mathematical sophistication. For obvious reasons, textbooks on actual weapon design, testing, engineering and maintenance are difficult to come across.
- Kenneth Krane's Introductory Nuclear Physics (assumes an undergraduate background in quantum mechanics)
- Weston Stacey's Fusion Plasma Physics (assumes a strong background in electromagnetics)
- James J. Dunderstadt's Nuclear Reactor Physics
- Robert Serber's Los Alamos Primer
- IANUS scientists Andre Gsponer and Jean-Pierre Hurni authored the technical report "The Physical Principles Of Thermonuclear Explosives, Inertial Confinement Fusion, And The Quest For Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons". It's available from the IANUS website.
There's pretty much an endless line of popular-audience books about nuclear weapons, especially their early design and the characters behind them (I've got about a dozen biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer alone). These require no particular scientific or mathematic background. Of them, the best include:
- Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb (winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction)
- Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
- Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography)
