Word: fissionability
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While working on nuclear-fission control at the Soviet Institute of Atomic Energy in 1958, the young scientist was stunned by his first meeting, in Geneva, with scientists from outside the Soviet Union. He still relates the experience with wonder: "For the first time I met foreign scientists, Americans, doing the same job and reporting their results. It was like meeting extraterrestrials -- extraterrestrials working with the same laws of physics. It was exemplary proof that science has no borders...
...first generation of nuclear weapons were the fission bombs of the 1940s and early '50s. In their quest for more powerful blasts, scientists developed fusion bombs, which became the second generation of nuclear weapons. Now a third generation is being developed that stresses finesse and pinpoint targeting...
...science: superconductivity. That discovery, most scientists believe, could lead to incredible savings in energy; trains that speed across the countryside at hundreds of miles per hour on a cushion of magnetism; practical electric cars; powerful, yet smaller computers and particle accelerators; safer reactors operating on nuclear fusion rather than fission and a host of other rewards still undreamed of. There might even be benefits for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which could draw on efficient, superconductor power sources for its space-based weapons...
TESTING. Regarding the problem of nuclear testing, I maintain that the combat capability of many new versions of nuclear weapons (of both the fission and fusion kind) can be reliably determined without conducting nuclear tests. A possible exception may be weapons based on new physical and design principles. But existing physical and design principles already are quite sufficient to manufacture nuclear weapons satisfying all military requirements. Testing is not required to develop new versions of weapons differing only in terms of dimensions, weight or other such parameters from those previously tested. Testing is currently not necessary to verify the reliability...
...principle divide every nuclear charge into four relatively independent systems: electronic, ballistic, atomic and (for a hydrogen device) thermonuclear. The reliability of the first three systems can be confirmed by laboratory tests supplemented by experiments in which a low-yield fission or fusion reaction releases a small quantity of neutrons, which can be measured by a counter close to the charge to be tested. The fourth system -- thermonuclear -- does not require testing in the majority of cases, since its reliability may be established by analogy to previously tested charges based on the same physical and design principles. At the same...