GRGR(8): Nuclear light

[Monte Davis]

Stencil:

> that fraction of a millisecond between ignition and epiphany

Good words, good insight. I think the Edgerton photos, or their successors I 
remember from early-50s TV newsreels while my father was at reserve training, 
must have been somewhere in his mind.

I'll adduce, also, Richard Rhodes' microsecond-by-microsecond description of the 
Alamogordo test in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" -- an absolutely, uhh, 
incandescent set piece whose loving, horrified detail has seemed TRPish to me 
since the first time I read it.

For the Obscure Apocalypic Fact File: the high-explosive implosion in the 
Fat-Man-style bombs had two purposes. One, fairly obviously, to compress the solid 
urranium or plutonium, literally bringing its atoms closer together and thus reducing 
the amount needed for critical mass. The second, less obvious, is that if the fissile 
atoms have *inward* momentum when the chain reaction starts, you gain an extra 
few microseconds before the fission energy can start to push them *outward* -- 
and that adds several generations to the total chain reaction, greatly increasing the 
blast. It's counterintuitive, because the fission energy is so much greater, but it 
happens at the instant when every little bit counts.

-Monte <who thinks that scrap of newspaper Slothrop will see in August is among 
the hinges of GR>