AH Challenge: Earliest Possible Nuclear Weapon

[RPW@Cy]

Nuclear weapons are hard. They require large amounts of modern physics. Significant amounts of modernish math. Lots and lots modern chemistry and probalby industry. Lots of modern money.....

Can't argue with any of that, really. But is it even remotely possible to do without waiting for the theory? I've been attempting to construct a timeline where someone (Wilhelm Wien seems a good bet) invents a mass spectrometer in the late 1890's (i.e. about 20 years early), which allows the Curies to discover radioactive isotopes while they're refining pitchblende and discovering all sorts of good stuff in the residue. This would further allow Rutherford, who was discovering radioactive decay and the half-life at the same time, to demonstrate that different isotopes have very different half-lives and decay paths, and may even advances his theoretical work on the neutron.

Shortly afterwards, around 1906, Pierre Curie is killed in a lab explosion when in experimenting with techniques to separate out isotopes he accidentally manages to concentrate enough U-235 to start a small chain reaction. In the aftermath, other experimenters (who?) try to recreate the accident under more controlled conditions and (doubtless after a few more accidents) after a few more experiments manage to produce a rule of thumb estimate for things like the critical mass of U-235 and how it's affected by things like the shape and purity of the metal.

A few more years pass, and a skipload of cash, and somebody hits on a way of producing a very crude, gun type bomb, again by pure trial and error. The engineering has now run way ahead of the theory, but doubtless the likes of Rutherford and Marie Curie are working hard to catch up.

Is this at all doable, or is it pure ASB? It's the only way I can think of of getting a nuke by WW1 without a ridiculously early POD.

And if it is delivered by Zeppelin, is there any chance at all of an accidental thermonuclear reaction if it goes off next to, or even inside, the hydrogen envelope?

 

[Joseph Solis in Australia]

The earliest possible Nuclear Weapon is 1933 Hitler.

 

[Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy]

And no one says that nuclear bombs come first. In times of peace, we could have found nuclear reactors as a better thing than bombs, and discovered the bomb aspect much later.

A bomb requires merely letting the release of energy consume everything in its path, a reactor requires figuring out a way to control the release and tap that energy. Of course the bomb came first.

As for means of delivery, how about long-range railway artillery? Atomic Big Berthas? According to wiki, the Paris Gun that Germany used in WWI could fire a 94-kilogram shell 130 kilometers away. How much would a nuclear shell need to weigh?

 

[kojak]

A bomb requires merely letting the release of energy consume everything in its path, a reactor requires figuring out a way to control the release and tap that energy. Of course the bomb came first.

As for means of delivery, how about long-range railway artillery? Atomic Big Berthas? According to wiki, the Paris Gun that Germany used in WWI could fire a 94-kilogram shell 130 kilometers away. How much would a nuclear shell need to weigh?

The United States created some nuclear artillery rounds such as the W48 which weighed in at just under 60kg, but this was after a decade of research and miniaturisation of its first nuclear artillery round which weighed over 350kg.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Shortly afterwards, around 1906, Pierre Curie is killed in a lab explosion when in experimenting with techniques to separate out isotopes he accidentally manages to concentrate enough U-235 to start a small chain reaction. In the aftermath, other experimenters (who?) try to recreate the accident under more controlled conditions and (doubtless after a few more accidents) after a few more experiments manage to produce a rule of thumb estimate for things like the critical mass of U-235 and how it's affected by things like the shape and purity of the metal.

a couple of kilos produced accidentally????

 

[Faeelin]

I have a quote people may find interesting:

One could assume equally well [equally well to having created a transuranic] that when neutrons are used to produce nuclear disintegrations some distinctly new nuclear reactions take place which have not been observed previously with proton or alpha-particle bombardment of atomic nuclei [the kind that the Joliots and Rutherford were carrying out]. In the past one has found that transmutations of nuclei only take place with the emission of electrons, protons, or helium nuclei,
so that the heavy elements change their mass only a small amount to produce neighboring elements.

When heavy nuclei are bombarded by neutrons, it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element.

Section in bold is mind.

This is a criticism of Enrico Fermi's findings in 1934, when he fired neutrons at uranium in order to penetrate the nuclei.

Who's the author? Ida Noddack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Noddack

Why didn't anything ever come of this? I don't know, but I can imagine that Germany in 134 wasn't the most conducive place for women to study physics.

 

[RPW@Cy]

a couple of kilos produced accidentally????

I should have been more precise - the chain reaction was the accident, the production of sufficient quantites of the right isotope was quite deliberate. Oops

 

[TelClaven]

Though in ASB land, I read a short story once where there was one in the crimean war, but it had little effect

The book you're refering to was called Anti-Ice.

 

[Cockroach]

Thats your challenge. Bonus points if you explain the geopolitical effects of an earlier bomb.

Earliest A-Bomb given what? I mean I could always pull some industrialised Rome/China scenario out a pop a nuke into existance centuries before OTL.

Putting those more far-fetched ideas aside I'd probably agree that with one or two lucky breakthroughs a nuke could probably be built by 1930 at the very earliest.

 

[Michael Busch]

I'm a little confused about the OP. Is the goal to find the absolute earliest POD that makes a bomb (in which case we can arrange things such that a dinosaur evolves civilization or even something further off) or is there a restriction on how far we can diverge? If we want to bound things, we might invoke the discovery of uranium by Klaproth in Germany in 1789.

I have not read Klaproth's papers, but if he had noticed that his uranium oxide samples heated themselves, and assembled progressively larger masses ... It would have been messy, and required more than he refined OTL, but I could see people playing with the metal soon after. To make a bomb or anything other than a very inefficient reactor, you need to enrich the uranium. That means centrifuges or gas cascades, which weren't around until later.

 

[Tyr]

I'm a little confused about the OP. Is the goal to find the absolute earliest POD that makes a bomb (in which case we can arrange things such that a dinosaur evolves civilization or even something further off) or is there a restriction on how far we can diverge? .

Going back into changing evolution would be considered silly. Such things are generally restricted to history as opposed to pre-history.

 

[alt_historian]

The book you're refering to was called Anti-Ice.

Damn, beat me to it... somewhat different, since it's based on naturally-occurring antimatter, stable at sub-zero temperatures, rather than uranium/plutonium.

 

[Onkel Willie]

I don't know much about nuclear research and the resources involved and I don't know anything about physics but here goes nothing.

I think that the earliest possible nuclear weapon is only a few years earlier than IOTL ('42/'43 maybe) unless you give some scientists some very lucky breaks. The only people at the time who were determined enough to build an A-bomb are Hitler and Stalin. The earliest possible POD is in 1934. Unfortunately Hitler was antisemite and many good nuclear physicists like Einstein, Szilard, Teller and Fermi were jewish. He'd have to change his racial policies or have the Gestapo kidnap them. And he would have to drop other pet projects such as the V1 and V2 projects. Hitler liked expensive toys that might or might not work though. He probably would have loved the idea of an artificial sunrise over a Leningrad or Stalingrad. That is if somebody tells him how strong a nuke is. Stalin is a realist. He might think it's scientific mumbo jumbo. He might still do it if Hitler is doing it. Russia has the brute industrial power. Russia was the second largest industrial power in the world after the two five year plans. But did they have the know how to build one? A lot of intellectuals got wacked during the purges. Both probably wouldn't get one before 1942 even if absolutely everything goes right.

The Japs might give it shot too but IOTL their A-bomb project was disorganized. Both the army and the navy had one and their scientists were being pulled away every five minutes to work on something else. It never got the funding and the resources it needed either. I have no idea about how much Japanese scientists knew though. I know that there's a quite big uraniumdeposit in North Korea. A hydroelectric plant was nearby so they had enough electricity too. If they want one on time they would have to start digging like crazy in 1934 and they would have to cut the amount of funding and resources of the navy, the army or the airforce.

And there's one problem: None of them had a longe range bomber with a sufficient payload to carry one. The Russians only got one after WW2 when they copied the B-29 (the Tu-4 Bull). The Japs never got one. The Germans had the Heinkel He-177 but it was prone to engine failure and had a lot of other issues which weren't solved until very late in the war.

 

[FlyingDutchman]

As previous poster implied, the delivery method is the biggest problem IMHO.

The B-29 IRL was only just barely capable of nuke-delivery.
The Tu-4 as a lesser capable airplane would have required a lighter bomb.
I doubt the Axis had any bomer capable of flying high and fast enough with decent range and payload.

Using long-range artillery is probably going to be just as costly as developing a B-29 from scratch and that wasn't exactly cheap.
IRL the development of the B-29 was untill then the most expensive military program ever. IIRC it cost 3 bn USD (which is a 150% of the Manhattan program!).
AFAIK the high g-forces in shells are going to be a large problem for anything with mechanical stuff in it.
If the Americans already took a decade to get small bombs to keep working at much lower velocity and lower g-forces, I'd hate to have to guess how long it would take to get an A-bomb to 'survive' any kind of launch by Big Bertha or the likes.

Zeppelins are BTW out, due to speed. Unless you don't mind losing your deliverymethod + crew every time you want to use this weapon?

So unless you don't mind nukes as only kamikazeweapons, I doubt you can get a working heavy bomber like a B-29 in use before '42 or so, making your first delivery of a nuke not possible before that time.

 

[Jukra]

So unless you don't mind nukes as only kamikazeweapons, I doubt you can get a working heavy bomber like a B-29 in use before '42 or so, making your first delivery of a nuke not possible before that time.

There is the option of using seaborne delivery, ie. large torpedo or a mine emplaced by a minisub. In OTL Soviet November-class nuclear submarine was originally intended solely to deliver a massive torpedo containing a hydrogen bomb.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Or you could use a glider construction. Just fit the bomb with wings and drag it behind an aircraft with strong enough engines.

 

[alt_historian]

Or you could use a glider construction. Just fit the bomb with wings and drag it behind an aircraft with strong enough engines.

Probably something with engines would be better there... giant V-1, perhaps?

 

[RPW@Cy]

As previous poster implied, the delivery method is the biggest problem IMHO.
Zeppelins are BTW out, due to speed. Unless you don't mind losing your deliverymethod + crew every time you want to use this weapon?

I'd agree that losing the Zeppelin is unavoidable, but there must be ways of avoiding losing the crew - having the Zeppelin flown by radio control from an aircraft 10 miles back for example, or simply having the crew lock the controls that far out and parachute out (this would work best when attacking a coastal target so they could be picked up by a submarine that's coordinating with them, I wouldn't fancy their chances of survival if they bailed out over land and got caught by the people they just bombed). Even if that's impossible history has shown us that in time of war it's usually possible to get volunteers even for suicide missions.

Agree though that if airborne delivery is ruled out ship or submarine is your onyl practical way.

 

[alt_historian]

Agree though that if airborne delivery is ruled out ship or submarine is your onyl practical way.

As shown in the Worldwar series... nuclear landmines anyone?

(And before anyone brings it up, yes I know they existed. )

 

[FlyingDutchman]

There is the option of using seaborne delivery, ie. large torpedo or a mine emplaced by a minisub. In OTL Soviet November-class nuclear submarine was originally intended solely to deliver a massive torpedo containing a hydrogen bomb.

The first Soviet nuke weighed 10 000 pounds.

That's a bit like dragging a monstertruck behind a bike.

The same goes for Onkel Willie's idea of a glider; the problem is the enormous size and weight of the first A-bombs.
Putting your bomb behind the craft transporting it instead of in it, isn't going to solve anything.

But with a ship you run the risk of losing the ship that's delivering your bomb, which almost happened when the Americans lost USS Indianapolis, a CA which was sunk by torpedoes just after she'd delivered the nuke to the Pacific.

I'd agree that losing the Zeppelin is unavoidable, but there must be ways of avoiding losing the crew - having the Zeppelin flown by radio control from an aircraft 10 miles back for example, or simply having the crew lock the controls that far out and parachute out (this would work best when attacking a coastal target so they could be picked up by a submarine that's coordinating with them, I wouldn't fancy their chances of survival if they bailed out over land and got caught by the people they just bombed). Even if that's impossible history has shown us that in time of war it's usually possible to get volunteers even for suicide missions.

You'd run the risk of the Zeppelin changing course to a gust of wind.
It won't matter much if it's less than a km from the target when the A-bomb goes off, but much more than that and IMHO you would have missed.

Probably something with engines would be better there... giant V-1, perhaps?

The V-1 could carry a bit over 1500 pounds for only a max of 250 km.

So that means you need a V-1 capable of carrying 10 times the weight, for a range of 20 times what the original could. (if comparing it to the range of the B-29).
That's one hell of a giant V-1...

Just like with the Zeppelin, you'll run a large risk of missing your target.
Something like 75% of V-1's IIRC were either intercepted, malfunctioned or missed their targets.
Using a guided rocket will only mean you, apart from developing nukes years ahead, also have to develop rockets and their guidance systems years ahead of schedule. This is not a solution.

"Easiest" is still developing something like the B-29 or even better, a true intercontinental bomber like the B-36.

Even if that's impossible history has shown us that in time of war it's usually possible to get volunteers even for suicide missions.

True, but if you want a weapon you can use regularly, it's not really usefull you lose your crew every time you use an A-bomb.
It's very possible that earlier nukes would have meant a lot more nukes used than the two IRL.
Then it really starts to be a disadvantage you lose your crews.