Nuclear Weapon Design - Explosive Testing

Explosive Testing

Nuclear weapons are in large part designed by trial and error. The trial often involves test explosion of a prototype.

In a nuclear explosion, a large number of discrete events, with various probabilities, aggregate into short-lived, chaotic energy flows inside the device casing. Complex mathematical models are required to approximate the processes, and in the 1950s there were no computers powerful enough to run them properly. Even today's computers and simulation software are not adequate.

It was easy enough to design reliable weapons for the stockpile. If the prototype worked, it could be weaponized and mass produced.

It was much more difficult to understand how it worked or why it failed. Designers gathered as much data as possible during the explosion, before the device destroyed itself, and used the data to calibrate their models, often by inserting fudge factors into equations to make the simulations match experimental results. They also analyzed the weapon debris in fallout to see how much of a potential nuclear reaction had taken place.