In my last video, I stated a few things about the size of the smallest nuclear weapons and that the soviet Briefcase Nukes of the 1990s probably didn’t exist because the physics wouldn’t allow it.
Well, I have some news on that, a few days after, I was contacted by a viewer who saw the video and gave me a few pointers to a man, who while not widely know to the public, was a key figure in the development of the US nuclear weapons program, and amongst many things was the creator of the smallest nuke ever to be fielded the Davy Crockett and was fascinated by how small you could really go. He was also the designer of the most powerful fission device, the Super Oralloy Bomb and the most efficient fission weapon and yet the most polluting ever tested by the U.S. program.
It was at his suggestion that nuclear tests be routinely carried out within the US mainland instead of relying upon the Pacific testing grounds, and after he left Los Alamos, he became a vocal critic against the use of nuclear weapons and the insecurity and loss of weapons-grade materials, both Uranium and Plutonium at privately owned fuel fabrication and reprocessing plants in the US in the 1960s and 70s.
The man I’m referring to was called Ted Taylor. An American theoretical physicist, specifically concerning nuclear energy, who failed his oral preliminary examination on mechanics and heat to get into Berkley but went to become one of the most revered bomb designers at Los Alamos and the in the US as a whole, and by the age of 25 was advising 4 star generals at the Pentagon as a consultant on nuclear strategies in case war with the Soviet Union, as well as designing atomic bombs for them to meet specific requirements.
And on the subject of small nukes, which he led the field on, he said that he could make a bomb quite a bit smaller than the Davey Crockett and that anyone with a reasonable amount of knowledge and access to fissile material could make a crude nuclear device with information already in public domain, and that was in the early 1970s, which we’ll come back to those points later.
Now, Taylor, like many of his fellow weaponeers, didn’t build bombs for the money, they did it because they loved the fact that they were finally utilising and releasing some of the most powerful forces in the universe. Namely, the Strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom, and the Electromagnetic force, specifically Coulomb repulsion that helps “push” the two halves of nuclei apart once they have absorbed a neutron and become unstable enough so that the strong force can no longer hold them tightly together.
1 gram of Plutonium-239, if completely fissioned, releases roughly 2.0 million times the energy of 1 gram of oil.
By understanding these fundamental forces, they were able to release some of that energy potential to create the largest man-made explosions so far in human history. But this came back to haunt many of the original Manhattan Project members after the bombing of Japan, especially the project leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
But humans being what they are, no one after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wanted to be on the receiving end of a similar type of bomb, so those nations that were capable, created their own versions, and the world has lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation ever since.
Taylor was born in 1925 and, as a child, was given a chemistry set when he was 7 or 8, which rapidly turned into an amateur lab for creating explosions, something that he remained fascinated by for the rest of his life. He wasn’t attracted to the damage, just the sheer thrill of the bang, and the bigger the bang, the better. Although his parents were very relaxed about his experiments, he was forbidden by his mother to make nitroglycerine.
Taylor was brilliant but was not academically gifted. While he was in the Navy and after Japan surrendered, he requested for a billet in atomic research but was overlooked and sent on an attack transport to collect personnel from Pacific outposts. One of these was Eniwetok atoll in Micronesia. As he steamed away from the islands, little did he know that in just a few years this place would change his life forever.
After leaving the Navy in 1946 he applied for graduate school at the University of Berkeley, California. However, he found the courses uninteresting and the style of teaching boring.
Although he studied hard, he followed his interests more than the core subjects and when it came to the preliminary entrance exams, he failed not once but twice, and was told that he couldn’t remain at Berkeley.
However, during his time there, he had worked under Robert Serber, a major figure in the Manhattan Project who thought he was a person of special and unusual ability and called a colleague at the Los Alamos laboratory who was the director of the theoretical division and agreed to give him a go.
At the age of 24, in November 1949, he arrived in New Mexico with his newly married wife Caro, to start work at Los Alamos. On the first day, he was shown his desk and then handed the plans for uranium and plutonium bombs.
His first assignment was to calculate the possibilities of creating a much smaller version of the Fat Man implosion bomb used on Nagasaki.
By this time, most of the theoretical division was working on the superbomb, an Idea which had been proposed by Stanisław Ulam and refined by Edward Teller, both of whom were key figures in the Manhattan Project. This design would become known as the Ulam-Teller thermonuclear device and commonly known as the H Bomb.
Although it was still not a given that it would even work, for the H bomb or fusion bomb to function, it would need a fission bomb to start the process. This was the only way they could get the 50 million degrees and pressures required to fuse hydrogen into helium and in the process release many times more power than even the biggest fission bombs could produce.
By then, fission bombs were seen as a finished idea that just needed to be tidied up and become an assembly-line matter, but they would need to be greatly reduced in size to make the H bomb a practical device.
As he worked, he became convinced that the implosion design could be improved in many ways, but the way in which they were being tested was very inefficient. Instead of testing incremental iterations of a design, whole new bomb designs would be tested.
Ted realised that small changes could make a big difference to a bomb’s performance, he came up with new sizes, shapes and yields and a whole new approach to testing. He proposed testing the same design over and over, with just one or two changes to truly understand if they were making things better or worse.
Ted discussed his idea with George Gamow, who had defected from the Soviet Union in the 1930s and was one of the progenitors of the Big Bang theory and popularising science in books.
After hearing Ted’s proposal, Gamow spoke to Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, and a meeting of the senior members of the theoretical division was organised, which read like a who’s who of the Manhattan Project.
He told the meeting of his ideas and that the experimental testing of individual processes in implosion systems was too much to keep going to the Pacific for just a part change, and that the tests should be done on the US mainland.
The meeting was a success, and after a critical review, the A.E.C. established test sites at Yucca Flats and Jackass flats in Nevada to allow testing as Taylor had suggested.
Taylor was now a rising star and given much more time and access to the computer, remember they were very rare back in the 50s, and computer time was a very limited privilege. He was also given the freedom to use his imagination. The devices he came up with were gaining more attention and were sent to Eniwetok for testing.
By the fall of 1950, he was asked to go along with two others to Washington and the Pentagon. Here, the 25 year old Taylor was treated like a star, meeting fleet admirals and 4-star generals and having access the highest security levels. For the next 6 weeks, he worked on 3d stereoscopic reconnaissance photos of soviet infrastructure, his job was to estimate how big a bomb would be required to take out a target.
During this time, he had discussions with generals who thought that the upper limit for a fission bomb was 100KT and that beyond that, so much uranium would be required that it would fizzle out, he said he thought he could do much better.
The generals wished him luck, and on his return to Los Alamos, he started work on the Super Oralloy Bomb or S.O.B, so called because of the historical code name for weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium with a high percentage of the fissile Uranium-235.
Tayor designed it to have a yield of 500KT, and it was successfully tested with an air drop from a B-36 at Eniwetok for the Ivy King shot. When asked many years later what the actual yield was, Taylor wouldn’t comment but did say that it was in the “Megaton” range, something normally only used to describe H-Bombs, but it was and still is the largest detonation of a pure fission device and quoted as the design figure of 500KT.
Taylor thought that this was big enough for any application, and it also solved the issue that was plaguing the development of the first H-bomb in creating a small, very powerful fission device to initiate the second-stage fusion explosion.
The first H-Bomb, Ivy Mike was also part of the Ivy test along with King on the 31st Oct 1952, 15 days before Taylor’s Ivy King test, Ivy King being the backup test in case Ivy Mike was a failure.
However, Mike wasn’t a true bomb, it was more of a complete nuclear laboratory that was assembled on the island of Elugelab, part of the Eniwetok atoll. Mike was so large that in total it weighed 74.4 tons and required a cryogenic freezer plant to keep the hydrogen fuel as a liquid in the tropical heat, which was housed in a corrugated-aluminium “shot cab” building because it was not weaponizable. Mike was a proof of concept, and the liquid hydrogen design was quickly abandoned for solid-fueled designs after the success of the Castle Bravo shot two years later.
Taylor began the think that this whole race towards making bigger and bigger bombs was futile and that for tactical warfare, much smaller weapons would be more useful and might not trigger an all-out nuclear war compared to the use of a multi-megaton device.
In 1953, Taylor at the request created the most efficient fission bomb ever created with a new hollow core design. The bomb named Harry was codenamed Hamlet but became infamous and was given the name Dirty Harry by the press for being the most polluting bomb test ever conducted on the US mainland, depositing an unusually large amount of fallout across 3046 counties across the United States. This was due to miscalculation and a change of wind direction with much of which later accumulated in the vicinity of St. George, Utah.
By 1955, Taylor had turned his attention to how small he could make a pure fission device. A question which he asked himself was, “what was the yield you could get out of something the size of a softball”.
What followed was a series of small bomb tests, Bee, Hornet, Viper & Puny Plutonium Bomb. The last one, the test was called the P.P shot and was the first known nuclear test failure as the bomb fizzled rather than detonating. But this didn’t worry Taylor, he was experimenting with the minimum amount of Plutonium in order to create a baseline for future work. When asked how small it was, he said he couldn’t comment.
Although Freeman Dyson was not working at Los Alamos, he followed Taylor’s work and said that it was basically miniaturising weapons and that he was the first man in the world to understand what you could do with just 3 or 4 kg of plutonium and that making them was an easy thing to do.
He was a cross between an inventor and a scientist. He came up with ideas quickly and spent little time on the mathematical details. Instead, he created the design in his head and then sketched it out and guessing, but the thing was that his guesses were almost always right.
Taylor left Los Alamos in 1956 after his views on bomb making changed and he joined General Atomics where he helped develop the TRIGA reactor to create isotopes for the medical field. These reactors were designed to use uranium zirconium, providing it with a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity in such a way that if they got too hot the reactivity would decrease and it could never go into a meltdown situation.
In 1958 he began working on Project Orion, a huge rocket that would be powered by using up to 2000 miniature atomic bombs to act as a pusher against a massive metal plate on the base of the craft and in theory get to Mars in a fraction of the time of a chemical rocket. Work in this continued until 1963 with the introduction of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which stopped the testing of the devices and the project was stopped.
In the 70s Taylor argued that anyone with a reasonable amount of knowledge could make a crude atomic bomb because all the details to do so were already in the public domain, with documents like the Los Alamos primer.
This was a declassified printed version of the first five lectures given by Robert Serber on the principles of nuclear weapons, which were given to new arrivals at the then top-secret Los Alamos laboratory during the Manhattan Project. When it was declassified in 1965, it was said that the contents would be of little use today to someone attempting to build a nuclear weapon and that anyone wanting to use it would need to set up their own Manhattan Project.
Taylor said that this would not be necessary because the Manhattan Project had already worked out all the details, and now you just needed to understand the plans without reinventing the wheel. His concern was that even a crude version of the gun-type device like the Hiroshima bomb, which would be easier to make, would still be a viable weapon in the wrong hands.
He also became concerned to find that with the rapid growth in private reactors making highly enriched Uranium 235 and plutonium 239 for the government and other private power companies, just how easy it could be for a determined group of people to steal possibly 100’s of kilograms of fissile material either from poorly guarded facilities or even easier when it was be transported across the US with normal shipping companies with little or no safe guards.
There was also the fact that fissile material did go missing from processing plants, and this was accepted within the nuclear industry as MUF or Material Unaccounted For. In a large fuel fabrication plant, every action that machined, drilled or milled would create waste material that could amount to dozens of kilograms each year and workers on the inside could smuggle material out if they were determined.
Taylor said that prisons had armed guards to keep the inmates in, but almost none of the fuel processing plants had them to keep the deadliest materials on earth, safe.
One instance he highlighted amongst many was the case of a truck with a full load of plutonium sent on a journey of hundreds of miles. Soon after it set off, the shipper realised there was an error and needed the truck to return. Because there was no radio or any other form of communication, the shipping company called both state and local police along the route to stop the truck and turn it around. The truck made its way across five states and was never located by the police.
To Taylor, this highlighted the fact that the police were completely unaware that tons of fissile material were being shipped through their states with no escorts or armed guards and even in some cases on open flat-bed trucks, and that, should a real truck hijacking occur, they would have little chance of stopping or recovering such a potentially dangerous load.
The amount of material required to make a bomb was a lot less than many, including myself thought when I made the last video. Taylor said that he came up with a bomb design that would use less than a kilogram of plutonium and, in total would weigh under 10 kg, less than half the weight of the Davy Crockett or the Special Atomic Demolition Munition, but it was never built or tested.
On the use of Plutonium metal for a crude implosion bomb, he said that it wouldn’t matter if it were metal or the powered form of plutonium dioxide, because once it was compressed with a high explosive charge, the effect would be the same.
Because of this, and there had been several nuclear bomb blackmail attempts in the 1970s against cities in the US, in 1974, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team or NEST was setup to respond immediately to any type of radiological accident or incident, including improvised nuclear devices anywhere in the world, and this is still running today.
Also, with the significant decline in the nuclear industry in the US after 1978, and the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents, there has been a greatly increased awareness around non-state actors getting hold of fissile material, as such, the security of these materials is now much higher than it was in the 60s and 70s.
So far, the fears that Ted Taylor raised over 50 years ago haven’t come true, and there hasn’t been the use of a crude bomb anywhere in the world. Tiny bombs could be constructed that might well be very inefficient, but something like a 10 or 100 ton yield is still a very big bang in an urban environment, not to mention the radioactive fallout that would be released, which would be even more of a danger in the long run.
Taylor once said that he wished he could magic away all the bombs and the knowledge of how to make them, but we can’t do that. All we can do is try and keep the materials to make them as safe and secure as possible, but maybe that is also just wishful thinking in an increasingly uncertain world and where other countries might not be so thorough in their safekeeping.
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