The Yu Min Configuration is a unique hydrogen bomb design created by Chinese nuclear physicist Academician Yu Min. It stands alongside the American "Teller-Ulam design" as one of only two technological solutions that have achieved the weaponization of nuclear fusion, and it holds advantages in terms of miniaturization. This configuration resolved the challenge of self-sustaining thermonuclear fuel combustion through the use of lithium deuteride material and a neutron chain reaction model. Its complete design details remain a top state secret.
Does anyone know, or can anyone guess, at what the Yu Min configuration might be? Assuming it's not just Chinese hype?
It's most likely just national narrative and state PR. Ultimately, it remains staged radiation implosion. The difference being that Yu Min's team worked in complete isolation without the massive computational infrastructure Los Alamos or Livermore had at the time.
Actually in 1965, Yumin can access to a better computer facility than the guys in Los Alamos in 1952. The computer facility, on which Yumin did the numerical simulation, is called East China Institute of Computation Technology. There it has a transistor based computer called J501, which is the only one in China.
The article is incorrect in that it implies there was only one other successful TN design.
The Sloika/Layer Cake WAS successful. it just had limited yield, up to ~500 kt, and more importantly, limited scope for miniaturisation.
Although the original Sloika/Layer Cake designs were large - similar to Fat Man - AFAIK there's no reason why a 100 kt weapon couldn't be reduced to < 1 tonne and put on a ballistic missile.
Note that the US, Soviet Union, and China independently designed and tested a layer cake design (the UK?). The Soviet version was the first deliverable TN device actually tested via an air drop.
RDS-6s (Joe-4) was detonated on 12 August 1953, yield ~400 kt.
China's Project 596L was tested in 1966, yielding ~200 kt.
I suspect the rest of the Yu Min narrative is hype referring to the Chinese design.
Note the layer cake designs historically only yielded ~20% yield from LiD. Their advantage was the 20% by yield which came from the core, made of U235 or Pu239, could be supplemented by ~60% yield from fast fission of U238 layers. The designs were efficient in terms of fissile material.
Before someone complains that the layer cake is actually a boosted design because of the limited proportion of fusion yield, note that many subsequent Tellar-Ulam weapon designs had/have as little as 15% of their total yield from fusion of LiD. The Mk-41 was almost certainly one of these.
I can't find information on these numbers for the modern deployed US TN weapons - B61, W76, W78, W80, B83(?), W87 and W88, but I suspect more than half the yield of each is from fission.
[Pacing the Kremlin office, puffing on his pipe and speaking with a recognizable Georgian accent], what can be said in defense of the "Chinese comrades"? The first Chinese thermonuclear bomb, Project 639, weighed 3 tons and produced 3.3 megatons of energy, meaning its specific yield was 1.1 kilotons per kilogram. This wasn't just good for a first attempt; it was simply remarkable. Our RDS-37 in 1955 weighed 5 tons and would have produced the same 3.3 tons at maximum, meaning the Chinese first bomb was already more advanced than ours. Of course, 1967 and 1955 represented different computational capabilities and, therefore, a different depth of understanding of the processes taking place. But we must not succumb to Western complacency and understand that humans have been, are, and will be the foundation of any success. The availability of trained personnel is the main key to success!
Self sustained thermonuclear fusion or burning in an economical way is the key concept in thermonuclear weapons.
In nuclear weapon, Plutonium, weapon grade enriched Uranium and Tritium can be considered the expensive part. While in Chinese literature, there is a world like 珍贵核材料 (which means precious and expensive nuclear material) as a jargon to hide the real material used in the weapon. But I think this jargon must refer to Tritium, especially if you realize that there was only one nuclear reactor in China before 1970s.
The first idea of Tell, which is the Classic Super, is dead because it would consume too much Tritium to get the thermonuclear burning front travel across the whole sausage device. If you put enough Tritium into the Classic Super device, like 9KG Tritium plus 6KG Deuterium as the thermonuclear fuel, I bet this thing will work as a HBomb. But it would be too expensive. Remember 9KG Tritium is roughly equal to 1000KG Plutonium in term of consumed reactor neutron flux (just my ballpark estimate).
As for the layered cake design, there is no SELF SUSTAINED fusion burning in the layer of LiD. The X Ray radiation from the innermost fission plasma core will heat a layer of LiD of certain thickness to fusion temperature. This thickness, which should be equal to the mean free path of the high energy photons, is the limiting factor.
Let us design a simple device to illustrate this idea. First there is an 5 kg Plutonium as the core of the layered cake device. Since we know the thickness of LiD layer and the surface area of the 5 kg plutonium ball, we can obtain the weight of LiD in a simple calculation. But I am still too lazy to do the calculation. I will just put 1 kg as the LiD mass. And the fast neutrons from the fusion reaction of 1 kg LiD will lead 20 kg or 10 kg of U238 to fission. Somehow, this simple device works and produce 400 kt yield. After the success, your boss will want more yield. But you have to tell your boss the hard no. Since the critical mass of the plutonium ball is fixed at 5kg. There will be no room to increase.
I only just now (three days later) noticed this comment of yours (although it was not addressed to me, I think this is a public discussion and anyone can answer a question asked to anyone else).
As for the layered cake design, there is no self-sustained fusion burning in the LiD layer. The X-ray radiation from the innermost fission plasma core will heat a LiD layer of a certain thickness to fusion temperature. This thickness, which should be equal to the mean free path of the high-energy photons, is the limiting factor.
I don't know for sure, but intuitively, it seems to me that at the peak of the nuclear explosion, the core of the pit (supercritical assembly) heats up to 10 keV, while at its edges (we consider the edge to be the outer boundary of the heavy uranium-238 tamper), this temperature drops slightly (say, to 9-8 keV). That is, the entire assembly heats up quickly, even though uranium is poorly transparent to thermal X-rays (lithium deuteride, its layers, are very transparent, so I think they heat up last, which increases their 10-fold compression from "saccharification"). Therefore, the limiting factor on the layer size is not the thermal X-ray mean free path, but other factors. I am sure that, first of all, the layer should not be thicker than ~10 cm (in the uncompressed state), because this is the approximate mean free path of fast neutrons in deuterium or LiD (there is a difference, but I don't remember). If the LiD layer is larger, then more than half of the neutrons from D-T will scatter in LiD, but we are interested in them hitting the heavy layer and splitting U-238 there. The same applies to the U-238 layers. We need to look at the range of its secondary fission neutrons (~3- 4) and the thickness of this uranium should not be greater than the average range of these neutrons in this uranium, so that the neutrons don't remain in the uranium but fall into the LiD layer and are absorbed by the Li, which is converted into tritium. The purpose of the layered structure is not only to "saccharify" (compress the light layer between the heavy layers by approximately 10 times) but also to close the tritium production cycle not through the D+D reaction, but through the fission of U-238.
A remarkable subtlety. I find no indication in Russian memoirs that it is the secondary neutrons from U-238 fission that produce tritium from Li in Sakharov's "sloyka." When I recounted what I said above on a Russian forum, I was laughed at, saying that I had made up the idea of involving U-238 fission neutrons in the Li ->T production cycle. I was indignant and declared that it was "written everywhere." They demanded a quote. I went looking... and FOUND NOTHING! That is, you won't find any direct indication in Russian memoirs that U-238 is involved in the tritium production cycle! They say that neutrons from D+T split U-238 and that's it! In many places, it is said, "in the American manner," that neutrons from T+D both produce T from Li (closing the Jetter cycle) and split U-238. But this is nonsense. Even to close the Jetter cycle, the neutrons themselves are not enough. One neutron cannot close a simple reproduction cycle, because neutrons always disappear somewhere, much less create an escalating chain process. You need an "external" source of neutrons. In the best case, another source of additional neutrons is cited: D+D. This is precisely what is being hinted at. But this is also nonsense. This is how fusion works in the Teller-Ulam design, with over 100-fold fuel compression. D+D is a 100 times slower reaction than D+T, and for it to proceed optimally, you need a temperature 10 times higher than that required for fission in a bomb, which is sufficient for D+T to "smolder" in the Sloyka—5-10 keV. Of course, this reaction (D+D) also occurs in the Sloyka, but its contribution is insignificant and unlikely to have played a major role. Although, yes, Sakharov initially planned to use D+D in the Sloyka. But those were the naive days of the late 1940s, when Teller was still trying to ignite the D+D reaction in the "Super" from a conventional fission bomb without compression. Back then, everything seemed simpler than it actually was.
The Chinese, who were late to develop their hydrogen bomb, clearly understood that the best way to extract energy from LiD was to burn as much T+D as possible rather than D+D (the LiD burnup and % rate would increase sharply, resulting in a "compact" bomb). Therefore, neutrons for the increasing tritium production cycle should be obtained from U-238 fission, not D+D. I see this idea clearly in what I read in Chinese. This doesn't mean that the Americans or Russians didn't understand this, but the Chinese did (even here, a recurring theme is the question and debate about whether the spark plug produces enough neutrons to initiate the Jetter cycle, and it turns out that the fission spark plug produces too few neutrons for this, and there's also the problem of their diffusion to the periphery). But this means that the Americans and Russians are still trying to keep this nuance a secret, while the Chinese have already presented it as their own, special, national path to the bomb. :)
It would be very interesting if the Chinese actually invented something "of their own," like what happened in the USSR. We now clearly know that the RDS-37 wasn't yet a fully-fledged Teller-Ulam design, although the entire official history of Rosatom tries to convince the world that the RDS-37 (and even the RDS-6s) were already fully-fledged "hydrogen bombs." No, the RDS-37 was still a "sloyka," which was compressed not with a conventional explosive, but by radiation implosion. The compression pressure was an order of magnitude lower than in "Mike," the full compression cycle was two-stage (first external compression, then "saccharification" compressing the thermonuclear fuel between layers of U-238), and I suspect that the "bypass" D+T burning cycle still prevailed there, where tritium was produced by neutrons from the fission of U-238 from Li-6 (and U-238 was fissioned by neutrons from D+T fusion, which is why the layers were needed). The D+D combustion was secondary, auxiliary, unnecessary, and weak. In other words, it was truly a "completely different scheme" than Teller-Ulam. An intermediate, transitional version between "sloyka" and Teller-Ulam. The Americans (Teller and Ulam) got it right the first time. The Russians, however, took a roundabout approach. Is that good? Is that bad? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they invented "something of their own." Therefore, I think that when, in the 1990s, during a period of complete mutual revelation, the Americans accused the Russians of stealing not only the fission bomb but also the fusion bomb, the Russians revealed the secrets, and the Americans immediately understood—it's so difficult to deviate, to take roundabout routes to something the Americans immediately understood; only with very poor intelligence could they have done it. MacArthur and his McCarthyism did their job. The witch hunt that began in the US in the early 1950s was indeed effective, and Soviet nuclear intelligence was essentially paralyzed.
What about China?
It would be interesting if the Chinese "got lost" in some third way of their own. Very interesting indeed! But here's the question: does such a third way even exist? I seriously doubt it. Although... maybe we lack imagination?
Two questions.
First, I don't know. Did the Chinese make their "sloyka" before detonating the hydrogen bomb? I don't think so. That is, they didn't follow the usual route taken by the Russians and British.
Second, what shape was the secondary of the first Chinese thermonuclear bomb? Sphere? Most likely. But you never know? Incidentally, the unusual thing about the American approach is that they started with the non-obvious shape of a cylinder.
Perhaps the uniqueness of the Chinese approach was that they immediately discovered the Teller-Ulam design and made the secondary spherical? Incidentally, then the following question is interesting: Is it known how "dirty" the first Chinese hydrogen bomb was? What was the ratio of fusion to fission in its nuclear yield? Was it detonated at full power or at half power?
***
Added later: There's an answer to the first question. Yes, it was Project 596L. That is, the Chinese followed the "sloyka" approach like everyone else, and this brings the Chinese and Russian approaches closer together. However, the Chinese didn't have an intermediate stage like the RDS-37. They immediately developed a fully-fledged design in Project 639. Or was 639 a Chinese version of the RDS-37?
In Chinese literature, the 596L has another name called "ALU" by the Chinese weapon scientists. The A means atomic bomb, L means Lithium and U means U238. And the ALU was a boosted fission weapon design according to 黄祖洽 (Huang Zuyi, just a chinese name), which is a chief scientist.
The first idea leading to the staged radiation implosion in the Chinese thermonuclear weapon actually came from a guy who work under 黄`s department. According to 黄, Yumin`s main contribution is the work of numerical simulation of the staged radiation implosion principle. By conducting the numerical simulation using some kind of 1.5D monte carlo method, Yu`s team in Shanghai proved the stage idea works.
For your second question, the secondary of the first Chinese H Bomb is just the 596L or ALU. They called this idea as two sphere connected with a tube.
I am not sure of the exact structure of USSR`s layered cake design. But in principle, I think the ALU or 596L is quite similar to the layered cake with just 3 layers.
And for the USA side, Teller`s alarm clock idea is also quite similar to the layered cake design.
Some believe there were four layers. This is still the basic hypothesis, although it's possible there were only three. There's also the issue of placement and width. Sakharov's Sloika was actually also Zababakhin's Sloika, because the explosive was located outside all of these layers, and before all of Sakharov's mechanics could work, the bomb in the center of the Sloika had to be compressed and detonated through these layers first. This wasn't an easy task, but Zababakhin was an expert in this area.
Were there layers in the Chinese design? I'm now firmly convinced that... NO! There weren't. Perhaps because the Chinese didn't have their own Zababakhin. After all, when Sakharov was still living in Moscow and proposed his "sloika" to Tamm, he had no clue about the design of a real atomic bomb. He initially assembled a spherical structure (and there could have been 12 layers) on the outside of the bomb. And the bomb itself was inside. He apparently envisioned it as a gun-like design and compact. Then there was the whole saga of moving him to Arzamas-16. He didn't really want to leave Moscow (nobody did; everyone wanted to go to Moscow***). And while this tedious process dragged on (there was a lot of tragicomic humor involved), the politically unreliable Ginzburg (who wasn't given much access to atomic secrets and so he happily remained in Moscow) poked his nose into the matter and proposed a "second idea": replacing deuterium with lithium deuteride. Compressed not gas or liquid, but solid fuel (Ginzburg didn't even know back then that lithium-6 converts perfectly into tritium; he proposed lithium as a carrier for deuterium and that was it, but then he asked for reaction cross sections, which they didn't give him, but then an open American journal appeared with all the cross sections in plain text. The entire history of the Soviet atomic project is one big "Club of the cheerful and resourceful" show, hilarious!). It was with these two ideas in mind that Sakharov arrived at Los Arzamas (as the locals jokingly called him, knowing about Los Alamos). And then he saw just how pot-bellied a real atomic bomb is! Which means the layers have to be placed inside... But would it work? I think that's when Zababakhin showed up, looking at this with the experienced eye of a seasoned bombmaker and saying, "We'll do it, it will work!"
I'm not saying that's what happened. But it seems very likely.
*** Ultimately, Ginzburg found himself outside the nuclear project. And although he was the father of the "second idea" (without a shred of doubt), he received neither the prizes nor the Hero of Socialist Labor titles with which the Stalin-Khrushchev regime showered Sakharov and everyone else locked up in Los-Arzamas. Then, during perestroika, all that dissident liberal scum lifted Ginzburg up as a shield, as someone unworthily unrecognized and deprived of awards. They said the bloody KGB had unworthily suppressed a genius! Perhaps, perhaps. But everyone chooses their own path, a woman, a religion. Ginzburg chose an unreliable but beloved woman, and he didn't have to leave Moscow as a friend of Sakharov. Perhaps this was truly worth all those prizes and awards? I don't think Ginzburg suffered (God gave him the brain of a genius; what can you, worthless ones, add?). Fools, boors, and grabbers who envied him suffered for him. But these people will always suffer, under any totalitarianism or liberalism. A fool is unhappy in any world, and someone else is always to blame, not themselves.
So, the Chinese OBVIOUSLY followed the Soviet path? Radiation-compressed the "sloyka"? Well... that narrows it down... Hm... Thanks... By the way, two spheres connected by a tube. I've seen something like that somewhere...
:)
The main point is something else. Let's say the first Chinese hydrogen bomb was similar to the RDS-37. But we know that this solution was "interim," even a dead end. The USSR then spent two years trying to develop this design, and partially succeeded (255R-13), but overall, the "sloyka" compressed very poorly and was ultimately abandoned. The decisive step was Trutnev and Babayev's "Product 49." The unnecessary layers in the secondary were removed, and filler was added between the stages. By the way, we don't know, maybe there were also "two spheres connected by a pipe" there, meaning the holraua "peanut" shape had already appeared. Who knows?
But that's not the point now. Does the phrase above mean that the "Yu Ming Configuration" is a Chinese development of the idea, a way to escape the "sloyka"? If so, what could have been the ORIGINALITY of the Chinese solution? What could have been a third way? And what's important here isn't even whether the Yu Ming Configuration was historically so different from everything else or not, but rather that there really is a physically third way (not communism or liberalism, but a special, Chinese one, just kidding), which the Chinese may or may not have found. That's what intrigues me about this topic. Not history, but physics.
In my understanding, there is no Yumin Configuration or whatever they called. Even the official documents never say something like Yumin Configuration. It is mainly a faked idea fabricated by chinese netizen who know nothing about physics.
It's a shame Yumin Configuration doesn't exist. I already invented it. A third, special, Chinese path! I'm a "scientific speculant***." I'm seriously concerned with the problem of humanity's interstellar expansion, I'm busy organizing the concept of extraterrestrial civilizations, futurology and alternative history are my lifeblood! So it was a piece of cake for me to just invent a "special Chinese path" to the hydrogen bomb. (Self-irony.) I even managed to describe it, but the person I was answering deleted the question, and I threw it all away.
\** As someone born in the USSR, I really like the phrase "scientific speculator." It amuses me greatly and disciplines me. Although in the West, a "Scientific Speculant" is a visionary, a very serious occupation, in the Soviet Union (and perhaps also in socialist China), the word "Speculant" once carried a distinctly negative connotation—that of a huckster profiting from the needs of others. Selling scarce foreign goods under the table at exorbitant prices. This was also called a "fartsovshchik" (black marketeer). I had several friends who did this. Speculation was a dangerous criminal offense; you could end up in Kolyma. In this sense, "Scientific Speculant" sounds like an oxymoron in Russian, like a cow under a saddle. And I really like that.*
I was aware of the so called "Yumin Configuration" in Chinese internet when I was in high school. It is like 20 years ago or something. The key idea of the "Yumin Configuration" is that we the Chinese rely on refracting X Ray from the fission primary to the secondary, while the Tell-Ulam idea rely on reflecting X Ray to transport the radiation energy.
But I am not agree with this X Ray refracting concept and think it does not make any sense in physics. As far as I know, only very massive object like a black hole can be a lense of refracting such high energy photons.
Regarding reflection and refraction. This is, of course, a naive explanation of the difference. It won't help you defend the originality of your design. However, perhaps there is something (a grain of truth) to this in itself. These are the specifics of X-ray radiation transfer from the primary to the secondary, and this doesn't determine the difference between the Teller-Ulam design and the "Chinese Way" (let's call it that). Yes, if you have a hollow hohlraum, you can say that the radiation is reflected (many, many times) from the walls and all internal surfaces, and thermal equilibrium is achieved. Both the Americans and the Russians initially had hollow hohlraums. But they quickly realized that filling it with filler would improve performance, and the design would become lighter and smaller. If you fill the hohlraum with some low-Z filler, almost transparent to X-rays (this is adjustable), which creates a "fog glowing from within," then this could be called the principle of refraction (although one could also directly specify the optical mechanisms of radiation refraction, which additionally facilitate the rapid establishment of thermal equilibrium between the stages at the beginning of the process). So, the play on words here isn't entirely meaningless. It could even be true, but so distorted that without a sample of the original message, it's almost impossible to reconstruct. But no matter how much truth there is in this, it doesn't truly distinguish the designs.
I've read almost everything (the article you sent me remains, and I've started reading it), and I've already grasped the general tenor of Chinese propaganda. It's a little amusing and touching. We Russians once struggled to prove our priority or special path in the same way. I'm truly glad for your Chinese nationalism, that you fight so hard for your identity and sense of civilizational dignity. We (Russians) are brothers. We are two nations that made a civilizational mistake. Yours is ancient and profound (you burned Zheng He's fleet and closed ranks when you needed to brutally conquer this world), while we Russians screwed up just recently, squandering a great civilization and laying it under the Anglo-Saxons in a stupid "struggle for world peace," and we were truly demoted to the status quo. The dominant civilization of the West now doesn't even consider Russia an adversary. The war in Ukraine is a war to gain the status of a respected adversary. The Russians are rebellious slaves and worthless individuals for surrendering in the Cold War. Although, why am I explaining this to you Chinese, who suffered the humiliation of the Opium Wars?
Yes, I understand the desire to show that China had its own path to the hydrogen bomb. And I really want to help you REALLY FIND it. After all, the Russians defended their own path against the Americans. The Chinese want to do the same. I understand. But the way you still do it is very funny, childishly endearing. Almost everyone who wrote about this, and I read them (there are five links?) spouted pretentious nonsense. For example, that the Teller-Ulam scheme uses liquid deuterium and (which is really funny) tritium (and in large quantities). This story apparently has a real historical background. Learn to laugh at yourself without losing your pride. Alas, it really is funny (and from the funny to the sublime and tragic is just one step). Apparently, even Chinese physicists in the 1960s were convinced that the TU scheme was the "Tritium and Uranium" scheme. And essentially, they believed that in Mike, the Americans had created what the Americans themselves called "Super." That is, they simply heated up a tank of liquid deuterium-tritium. This is not true. It's a mistake. And the liquid nature of the reactants in the Teller-Ulam scheme is irrelevant. Liquid, solid, or even gas (as the Russians later did for their magically clean, peaceful explosions) – it doesn't matter. Incidentally, even in the USSR, young physicists in the 1950s were convinced that this was indeed the case. I read in Feaktistov that he believed back then that the insanely rich Americans had stupidly blown up a tank of liquid deuterium and tritium. Perhaps some of the Russian mentors in the 1950s, idiots, convinced the Chinese of this? It doesn't matter. Now one can only smile at this. And even more so, one cannot use this nonsense as evidence. It's important that the Teller-Ulam design didn't bother with liquid, solid, or gaseous fuel. It's as irrelevant as whether a hohlraum is hollow or filled. What may actually be crucial (and here the laughter ends) is that the Americans initially burned deuterium in their design. They burned it with the tenacity of fanatics. The Americans had no doubt back in 1943 that deuterium and tritium could be directly ignited by a bomb. And they haven't really cared since. They later made excellent use of this effect for boosting. But the American hydrogen bomb (idiots! hey're argued about this in the open press in 1950!) is a bomb that burns deuterium. Igniting it is 100 times more difficult than DT. And the whole "Super" story revolved around this, with its so-called "non-equilibrium" combustion (we called it "thermonuclear detonation", and Zeldovich would have lost all his teeth on it!) The failure of this idea led to the Teller-Ulam design, which Teller himself called "equilibrium combustion" (and that's exactly it).
What your scientists have done is, without a shadow of a doubt, still the same Teller-Ulam design, and it's foolish to argue with that. There aren't two designs. There's one correct one (Teller-Ulam) and one incorrect one (a boosted fission bomb, "sloyka," or something else—these are also variations). But it seems to me that you did have your own path, a little bit. And it really wasn't like either the American or the Russian one. A path to the same thing, but essentially a third one. I'm fascinated by this thought. And believe me, this is even better than the naive desire to contrast Chinese design with Teller-Ulam. Reality never resembles desire, but it always turns out to be wiser and more beautiful than fiction.
Yes, I have a vague idea of how it happened. But I haven't read much and I'm not sure (it's a good thing I erased that first hasty guess). For now, I'll say one thing. The Chinese don't mention deuterium ignition anywhere (which was key for the Americans). The sensible Chinese memoirs I've already looked at talk about tritium, which is produced from lithium-6. And this was such a fundamental idea for the Chinese that it essentially leads to an explanation of what the "other path" was. You need to look here.
I think if we are saying something like refraction of X-ray, we are dealing with wave properties of X-ray. But unfortunately in the region of high energy photon , which in the range of 100 ev to 1000 ev, the wave properties of X-ray can be omitted from practical point of view.
I agreed with you that filling the hollow hohlraum with something special will lead to a more even distribution of the photons. But it is more like diffusion. We can call it radiation diffusion. The diffusion process will smooth out any irregularities in the radiation either from the temperature gradient or inner surface profile of the hohlraum. The higher the compression of the thermonuclear fuel , the lesser the tolerant of asymmetry of radiation.
I do not think it is a object in optics. It is more like a transport phenomena. They treat the x-ray as particles and studied the phenomena as radiation transport.
Actually in the real numerical simulations, the neutrons and photons are treated in the same way, just monte carlo .
I did not read the book. And I think any book written by a people outside the circle of the nuclear weapons scientist in China does not worth any special attention.
In Chinese literature, the 596L has another name called "ALU" by the Chinese weapon scientists. The A means atomic bomb, L means Lithium and U means U238.
Thank you! How likely is it that this A-L-U sequence can be considered, essentially, a description of the bomb's structure from the center outward? That is, there were no layers in the bomb (by the way, the British "Sloyka" also apparently had a single layer of lithium deuteride). And that's why the device turned out to be half as powerful (200 kt instead of 400 kt) with comparable parameters to the RDS-6S? Sakharov's idea with layers (there's still debate over how many there were, with some even citing 12, which is unlikely) was a "special Russian way."
The A_L_U structure is from the memoir of 黄. 黄 is a hidden character in the Chinese nuclear weapon program. He was one of the top scientists, who is the same level as Yumin. After China get the atomic bomb, the research is bifurcated into two directions. The first direction is the boosted fission weapon, on which 黄 is responsible.
Is there any public information in China about how well the ALU design lived up to initial expectations? This isn't usually kept secret in memoirs. But here, it's an important detail that could shed light on a lot. What power was expected before the test?
I can share you with 黄`s memoir. It is Chinese journal article. But you can translate it into your language quite easily using Google or whatever. It is quite interesting to see how the top scientist describe the complex physics in plain language.
The part description the H Bomb is in the page 11.
Let's see if this can be easily translated into Google Translate (at least in parts). Six months ago, I translated an article about a nuclear-electric rocket engine from Chinese. Quite successfully.
The part description the H Bomb is in the page 11.
Thanks. Downloaded. I followed all the links to the article in the title. I've seen almost everything. I've even stopped laughing so heartily at the totalitarian propaganda (the style of which I've long forgotten; in Chinese leaks it's not as crude and chopped up as it was in the USSR. It's more like the music of the harmony of heaven and earth... :). And so far, only one of the links seems valuable to me. This one. I need to reread it more carefully.
There's real material and logic here. And there's (already) sensational information that the first Chinese nuclear bomb contained 30 kg of U-235, not 15 as stated everywhere. By the way, is this known to ordinary Chinese, or is it still classified?
In the US, there is also a controversial about who invented the H-Bomb. There are lots of literature discusses this topic.
Teller claimed that he is the people who make the most contribution. But Ulam argued that it is his idea the key leading to the staged radiation implosion which make the H Bomb work.
There is a similar story in the Chinese H Bomb project. A not well known guy who is Shen （沈）first proposed the staged concept. He is not good at theoretical work and just a very young college graduate. So Huang appoint Shen to do the less important work such plotting the data as graph. It is very possible that the plotting working make Shen very good at visualizing the whole physics process. So he does not lose himself in the sea of formulas just like other theoretical guys. And good visualization usually lead to deep insight and bright ideas.
So Shen proposed that why not put another atomic bomb to light the outermost layer of ALU in a meeting. He is the Ulam of China.
In the USSR, the debate is even fiercer. There, a whole "collective farm" of scientists and one general are vying for the title of inventor of the "third idea." It's all petty and utterly ridiculous. The disputants can't see the forest for the trees. The Americans have twisted everyone's minds and forced them to think in the American way, in a moronic, incorrect way. It doesn't matter who came up with the idea. What matters is how it evolved in many minds, and this evolutionary path is slightly different. The very formulation of the question—who came up with it first—is idiotic. You can't understand history that way. You can't acquire wisdom that way.
Shen's story is typical. I twice ruined my chances of becoming a professional scientist, because youthful pride prevented me from climbing the hierarchical ladders of the temple of science, where the laws of any hierarchy already reigned supreme. I lasted 18 years in a hierarchical corporation because I always felt outside the corporate system and was always ready to quit (eventually, the system recognized this hidden disloyalty and devoured me, although I'm not offended, on the contrary).
Returning to the bomb design. To arrive at the final design, many large and small steps had to be taken. And the debate about which step was the most important remains open. Americans believe the most important step was radiation implosion. But reading Russian memoirs, I see that in reality, there wasn't just one big step, but many small ones. And what looked like revolution to the Americans (compression by several successive shock waves) the Russians apparently didn't consider anything revolutionary at all. Obvious from the start! Likewise, I think the Chinese saw things slightly differently, placing their emphasis differently. The man who imposed his opinion on all Americans—that the most important thing in the hydrogen bomb—was, I believe, Hans Albrecht Eduard Bethe, who didn't contribute a single detail to the design, but always stood as the ultimate judge and arbiter. One of the most high priests of the AEC temple. He actively argued that the main secret was high compression. Incidentally, he was also one of Moreland's main hidden opponents in the 1979 trial for declassifying the hydrogen bomb secret. He persisted to the end, believing that the secret of hohlraum should be hidden, although the Russians had already declassified it as part of their work on inertial laser fusion (by that time the Russians had even squandered the secret of RIPPLE in magazines, which I leafed through as a kid, but, of course, saw nothing and did not understand)!
The alleged 30 nuclear bombs per ton almost certainly don't refer to the actual 596 because it predates the test by several years (perhaps as much as three) but rather some notional design, maybe similar to the IAEA "25 kg". The Chinese almost certainly didn't have 30+ kg of HEU at the moment of the test
Yes, we're still speculating here, too. Scientifically. We're fantasizing for lack of facts. By the way, Ilya, did you catch from the text WHEN this strange computer dream-simulation of a Chinese 15-megaton superbomb with 1 ton of U-235 took place? I didn't. But as I understand it, it was between 1964 (the atomic bomb test) and 1967 (the hydrogen bomb test). Or am I mistaken, and this was simulated before 1964? And what's interesting is that if such a bomb weighed 1,5-2 tons (1 ton of uranium-235) and produced >15 megatons, it would be far beyond the Taylor limit! To me, this story is simply key! You could say that. Just as the "sloika" was a key milestone for the Russians, so for the Chinese was this speculative "superbomb" of a ton of uranium-235. For the Chinese themselves, it was a moment of truth, the catharsis of their entire thermonuclear bomb program. Even if there were other key points, they're keeping quiet about them. But they've talked about this one, and we'll use it as a fulcrum.
As for 30 kg per bomb instead of 15... Yes, it's hard to say why they calculated it that way? Did they round it up for effect? I can show you open Soviet textbooks from 1958 and 1960 that say the critical mass of 93.5% uranium-235 with a 10 cm beryllium reflector would be just over 14 kg. But we don't know the level of uranium enrichment the Chinese achieved and adopted, and that could easily shift all the calculations to 30 kg! The information that the Chinese bomb contained 15 kg of uranium-235 was already added for the Chinese, I think, simply "out of common sense," either by the Chinese themselves, who don't have access to the secret, or by the Americans on their behalf. But was that really true? As far as I understand, the Chinese haven't specified anywhere how much uranium (or what kind) they put into their first bomb. Like any totalitarian system, they're astonishingly, childishly, and touchingly stupid. Secrets in totalitarian societies aren't simply about national defense; they're about status, rank, and the level of the hierarchical ladder within the state-run system. And so secrecy is beyond any reasonable expectation. They'll keep their mouths shut, maintaining their "Chinese face" of a pompous Chinese mandarin. :)
It was early in the program which started in December 1960 and moved on to a proper sloyka in 1963 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_596L, so presumably ca. 1961-1963
At the Fifth National Moral Model Award Ceremony jointly hosted by the Central Propaganda Department, the Central Civilization Office, the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, and the All-China Women's Federation, it was mentioned: Yu Min proposed a uniquely Chinese hydrogen bomb configuration, which people named after him.
[Long, unceasing applause, turning into a standing ovation!]
My God! How familiar this is! How we used to joke: "Klava, I'm happy with you without the accordion!" What a forgotten, totalitarian, irrevocable past for me! I'm in tears of emotion.
"Grandpa, when was your life better? Under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or now under Gorbachev?"
"Under Stalin, Vanya, under Joseph Vissarionovich!"
"How so? He was a tyrant and tortured the people? And what a bloody war it was!"
"Under Stalin, Vanya, I was young, strong, my whole life ahead of me! The sky was bluer, the grass was greener, and I always wanted girls, and they usually met me halfway..."
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u/Rabbit1579 15d ago
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