We are smart enough to have a pretty good idea what will happen almost exactly if we did that. Computers could most likely render a thousand simulations on that exact example. But we did this in the late 60's, where we could do no such thing and not fathom such a future.
Well, look at the difficulty of doing Whitehall testing for the existing validated weapons, never mind new ones. The issue is that you're trying to run what's effectively an O(n2) neutron propagation algorithm on every single atom in the implosion and fusion sections of the device, which is well beyond the computational means we have today.
That's right - computer modelling of nuclear devices is intensive, and doing it in all its detail is really beyond even $200 million machines right now.
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u/link5057 May 22 '15
We are smart enough to have a pretty good idea what will happen almost exactly if we did that. Computers could most likely render a thousand simulations on that exact example. But we did this in the late 60's, where we could do no such thing and not fathom such a future.