
What if the Trinity test had failed? - CapitalistCartr
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/07/16/what-if-the-trinity-test-had-failed/
======
Animats
Everyone involved was confident the gun-type bomb would work. They'd tested
bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close together in criticality
experiments. That experiment killed several people at Los Alamos.

The big worry was it going off prematurely. When the Enola Gay took off to
drop the uranium bomb on Hiroshima, their orders were that if they had to turn
back, dump the bomb in deep water. A billion dollars to the bottom of the sea.
That was preferable to taking the chance of blowing the airfield on Tinian off
the map if the B-29 had a fire on landing.

Making enriched uranium was slow, but working. The gaseous-diffusion plant
cascades were working, after months of startup. The second gaseous diffusion
plant at Oak Ridge, K-27, opened in September 1945, a few weeks after the end
of the war. If the war had dragged on, there would have been more uranium
bombs.

~~~
wtallis
> They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close together in
> criticality experiments. That experiment killed several people at Los
> Alamos.

I think the fatal criticality accidents at Los Alamos involved a single chunk
of plutonium and neutron reflectors:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)

~~~
ZeljkoS
The Demon core story is quite fascinating, I compiled several Wikipedia
articles to construct the full narrative: [https://svedic.org/history/demon-
core](https://svedic.org/history/demon-core)

~~~
dwd
Anytime I'm jimmying something open with a screwdriver I can't help think of
this story and how crazy dangerous holding two hemispheres of plutonium apart
with a screwdriver really is.

------
TheOtherHobbes
A lot of people would have been very surprised if it had failed.

The physics wasn't considered a mystery by then. Failure would have been
caused by fixable engineering and design mistakes - or sabotage - not because
the idea was unworkable.

There _might_ have been some completely unexpected physics at scale. But given
that nuclear reactors were already a thing, that would have been very
surprising.

~~~
beervirus
If your time tolerance is nanoseconds, the engineering is everything.

~~~
missedthecue
That's true with implosion but not gun type

~~~
baud147258
Trinity was an implosion type bomb, so the required tolerances were tight

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Syzygies
The Trinity test remains the most intellectually arrogant moment in history.
The bomb could have ignited the atmosphere, turned us into another sun for
reasons we didn't understand. They worried about this, and were fairly
confident in their calculations. But every century of physics brings the
realization we had little clue a century earlier. If the Trinity test had
behaved in an unexpected way, we wouldn't be reading this. That's what I
assumed the headline meant. I was disappointed.

~~~
sillysaurusx
You’re getting hammered for this, but you’re probably correct. One could
imagine a parallel universe where our test didn’t go so favorably.

One could also imagine a future physics breakthrough that we’re fairly
confident about, which turns out to be horribly wrong.

However, with each decade that the standard model turns out to be correct, one
could also imagine that this chance will never happen again; that we’ll be
forever confident in our predictions. (This seems the most arrogant statement
of all, though.)

~~~
Syzygies
The most important kind of intelligence is knowing what one does not know.
There's a mindset counter to this, that substitutes a model for reality and
then fervently believes the model. Math and physics exerts a very strong
selection force attracting people fond of this substitution. The responses
here do not surprise me.

Our extrapolations always take the form of moving along a tangent vector out
from prior experience. Prior to relativity, Newtonian physics was the belief
that we actually lived in that tangent space. Surprises come when the
deviations are large enough for reality to curve away from our models. I
thought I understood how materials behaved, till I was stuck briefly on a
mountain at -30F. People dance on decks that collapse. They smoke joints on
exposed foam mattresses. Surprises happen.

I appreciate that in this universe, our experience confirmed that physicists'
absolute faith in the Trinity experiment was well-founded. A billion runs of
parallel universes would have likely work out. Take this out to a quadrillion
runs? It turns out that alien life has always been here at the subatomic
level. Like dogs not liking fireworks, that nuclear ping really pissed them
off, so they engineer a virus that wipes us out. Or it turns out that indeed
there's a quantum basis to consciousness. After that nuclear ping, the
atmosphere is fine, but everyone on that side of the Earth keels over, no
longer able to think.

The Trinity test was a step further out along the tangent vector than we'd
ever taken before. We were deliberately creating a version of a Carrington
Event on Earth, with absolute certainty that we understood and anticipated all
consequences. The odds of calamity were small, but our existence was at stake.

~~~
ufmace
These type of concerns are pretty meaningless IMO. If we're going to speculate
about stuff like what might annoy subatomic alien life or somehow creating
some kind of quantum echoes or whatever that somehow destroy all
consciousness, that brings us to the point of anything at all might happen for
any reason at all. For all we know, me lifting my right pinky finger a quarter
inch right now will result in the entire planet just winking out of existence.

Such things get into non-falsifiability. Sure, we can never prove true or
false the idea that something we aren't even aware of might exist and do
catastrophic things for reasons that make no sense to us. But if we take such
ideas seriously, how could we ever do anything at all? Considering such ideas
can only be either pointless speculation, or a power exercise - it's very good
to be the person who decides what activities have an unacceptable risk of
causing catastrophically bad things to happen for inscrutable reasons, and
what don't.

~~~
Syzygies
We're inside a balloon together, poking at it with a needle. You're off on
some philosophical discourse about falsifiability. And all I'm trying to say
is we've never poked that hard before, are you sure you know what you're
doing?

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Maybe we (or some visitors in the past) already did, even harder? And it made
_poof_?

I mean the concept of a [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb)
reminds me of some descriptions of the inner workings of [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana)

Then there are things like [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkabah_mysticism#Prohibition...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkabah_mysticism#Prohibition_against_study)

A long time ago I saw some documentary about the ruins of the Khmer (No! NOT
Ancient Aliens! Seriuosly!) where they overlaid the groundplot by LIDAR into
the aerials which have shown only jungle. The thing is, that groundplot looked
exactly like the planar layout of some on-die microwave emitter I've seen in
some site like IEEE or phys.org a few weeks before.

I just thought _as above, so below_.

The older I get, the less unlikely I think of some so called "pseudo-history".

------
RangerScience
This is a pretty fascinating exploration into what wasn't known about the bomb
prior to the test, the range of expectations about what would happen, and the
various things that the test results affected.

------
HPsquared
Site seems to be down. Archive link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200716185116/http://blog.nucle...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200716185116/http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/07/16/what-
if-the-trinity-test-had-failed/)

------
plasticchris
One of the most interesting stories about.. work life balance... was in
Richard Rhodes' book
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb)),
about fixing imperfections in the high explosive castings with dental tools
just before (I think it was the night before?) the test. Another source here:
[https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity3.pdf](https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity3.pdf)

------
Koshkin
I find it most fascinating that when Little Boy was detonated the portion of
only about one kilogram underwent fission out of the total Uranium mass of 64
kg. So much destruction from such a tiny amount of stuff...

------
chasd00
if you have never been to the nuclear science museum in Albuquerque NM is
amazing... and a little surreal.

I remember walking outside to see the planes and icbms, off in a corner mixed
in with some scrap was a pallet with a big metal cylinder thing. I thought it
was construction equipment or just trash but, nope, it was a B41. The B41 is a
25mt air dropped bomb, the largest strategic nuke ever fielded by the US.

I had a couple moments like that at the museum. Behind a door was a bomb
casing with B61 written on it with a sharpie.

these were the most destructive devices ever conceived of by man but just
strewn about like what you'd find in some old timer's garage.

------
blibble
there was a very early Sliders episode about exactly this!

[https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_World](https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_World)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
They got the bit about nuclear power wrong though. Fission was discovered in
Germany just before WWII, which is why Einstein (the real one) was concerned
that the Germans might develop nuclear weapons first and advised the US to do
it. At that point it wasn't obvious that a bomb was possible even if fission
was, but even if it wasn't, the application of fission to power generation
would still have been obvious.

If anything they'd have probably had more nuclear power generation, because
the proliferation risk wouldn't have been a concern and the scary association
with city-destroying weapons wouldn't have been such a PR problem.

~~~
trimbo
> Einstein (the real one) was concerned that the Germans might develop nuclear
> weapons first and advised the US to do it.

Leo Szilard had this realization, wrote the letter, and got Einstein to sign
it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter)

------
johnklos
"It should not be much less than me thousand tons unless there is an actual
malfunctioning of some of the components."

"me" == "meh"?

~~~
JoshuaDavid
"One" I think. Probably was "ne" and got autocorrected to "me" instead of
"one" (would make sense, "less than me" probably occurs more often than "less
than one").

------
cryptonector
TFA asks a bunch of what-if questions -- very good ones indeed.

> Would a failure at Trinity have changed the outcome of World War II in any
> significant way? Ultimately this question relies on what you think caused
> the Japanese to offer up a conditional surrender on August 10th, and then an
> unconditional surrender on August 14th. In particular, it depends on how
> important you think the Nagasaki bombing was for the decision-making of the
> Japanese high command.

I think it's pretty clear that a) the Japanese had been willing to surrender
on one condition (keeping the emperor) for weeks, b) the U.S. was holding out
for an unconditional surrender, c) the USSR entering the war pushed Japan to
make, and the U.S. to accept, a privately-conditional / publicly-unconditional
surrender. I believe the bombs made little real difference. From a Japanese
perspective they destroyed nothing that hadn't already been firebombed to
smithereens -- all large- and medium-sized cities already had been firebombed
to smithereens. It's really hard to believe that the war with Japan would have
had a different outcome if either or both bombs had not been dropped.

But I found this very interesting:

> After getting the successful results from Trinity, Truman took a very hard
> line with Stalin. He believed that the bomb gave him leverage for both the
> end of World War II and the peace that would follow. Though he did not try
> to argue that the Soviets should not declare war on Japan or stop their
> invasion plans, he was less convinced he would need the Soviet entry into
> the war, and did not encourage them.

Well! If he had been certain enough to demand that Stalin not enter the war,
that might have meant we'd have no North Korea today. Interesting thought.

~~~
Syzygies
The mayor of Nagasaki reported that the bomb was a dud, and only then realized
he'd heard nothing from the north half of the city. Same statistical paradox
as the Brits reinforcing the parts of planes that returned with bullet holes,
until someone said, "Um", ...

The Japanese surrendered before realizing that Nagasaki had been half
destroyed.

The bomber crew was going to release on radar alone, against orders, realizing
this made more sense than releasing over the ocean before landing. Then they
saw an opening in the clouds. Not a good day for visibility; Nagasaki wasn't
even the primary target.

------
panzagl
Failed like didn't explode or failed like set the entire atmosphere on fire?

~~~
OvidStavrica
I think they refer to the failure mode where: Nothing happened for a day or
two. All the experts travel to the location to try to understand what went
wrong, in situ... and THEN the explosion occurs.

~~~
iguy
This really wasn't a plausible failure mode. They had many (9?) detonators
which had to be very precisely simultaneous, and had done a lot of tests of
those alone (this was cheap & easy). As long as just one of them worked, you
would burn all the explosives (just not in the right order) and destroy the
device.

~~~
catalogia
I'm sure they had some redundancy in the systems required to fire those
detonators too, but how much?

~~~
iguy
Not sure how you would quantify this, but enough? Inventing detonators that
worked fast enough (i.e. small enough error in firing time) was one of the
challenges. They did a lot of tests of those explosive lenses. (32, not 9, of
course.)

The electronics to fire them would have comparatively easy to test well, and
I'm sure they over-designed it all. I doubt that duplicating it would have
made anything better.

------
dgrin91
What if this website fails because it got hugged to death?

