PHYSICS OF NUCLEAR EXPLOSIVES

i read this with two hats: my no-physics-degree-but-comfortable-until-the-hamiltonians-get-nasty hat, and my i-hope-to-live-under-a-volcano-and-burn-all-the-cities-of-the-world hat. both found it delicious!even if you've read your zeldovich ( physics of shock waves and high-temperature phenomena), there's plenty to pick up here, though Barroso does superbly distill the most relevant elements of that sometimes-overwhelming reference. perhaps most valuable in my mind was the review of inertial confinement fusion papers from the open literature, papers i had assumed fewer, and more useless. his chapter on thermonuclear detonations (the last) is most welcome, confirming in my mind Sublette's conclusions regarding Teller-Ulam radiation implosion (particularly that it is the energy of ablation which drives the majority of external compression, not indirect drive from the lining's reradiated x-rays) and extending it a great deal -- we've all known about spark plugs in the secondary since Howard Morland's article in the November 1979 Progressive, but only as a qualitative concept. Barroso's treatment of the practical difficulties of igniting LiD (as opposed to a true LiDT mix for that tritium punch) motivate the spark plug, and his expansion upon reflected shockwaves was entirely new to me.the earlier chapters, regarding fission weapons, are less novel, though still excellent. one thing i'd've liked to have seen a more thorough treatment of was alpha as a function of initial neutrons; neutron initiators are IMHO the least well-understood part of the physics package for those of us outside the walls of classified information. if i'm in a cave somewhere trying to cobble together a 80kT boosted yield on a budget (and i pray every night that i someday will) without drawing the attention of the federales, i don't have the time to explore the cornucopia of microsecond-scale neutron emitters. i'd also liked to have seen more treatment of U233, easily grown from thorium around the home (watch out for those hard gammas, though). if you've explored the hydrocodes made available to we plebes, you've seen most of the software packages Barroso introduces. with that said, he runs exactly the experiments you'd want to see, and you don't have to bother with linking up your own copy of BLAS with fortran bindings.though, why don't you have a copy of BLAS with fortran bindings?math is kept at a very approachable level, nothing really beyond diffeqs. if you can't work diffeqs, you probably shouldn't be designing nuclear explosives, but hey i'm not a cop.five stars for the finest book about nuclear weapon design i've yet read (and i'm pretty sure i've read them all). mandatory reading for all supervillains.

This is a remarkably thorough and complete textbook on a technical subject that was kept in shadow for decades. I was pleased to get it at a discount price.

I wasted $97.00 of my money... don't waste yours.