Image:Los Alamos Primer assembly methods.png

A number of the fission bomb assembly methods proposed during the summer conference on bomb design held at UC Berkeley by Robert Oppenheimer in 1942 during the Manhattan Project. These drawings are taken from the "Los Alamos Primer" — Los Alamos Report LA-1 (declassified 1965) — and were created in 1943 by Robert Serber (available on Commons at Image:Los_Alamos_Primer.pdf).

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It depicts (from top to bottom): 1. shooting a "cylindrical plug" into a sphere of "active material and some tamper"; 2. a "well tamped spheroid"; 3. pieces "mounted on a ring" with explosive material distributed around the ring, which when fired "the pieces would be blown inward to form a sphere"; 4. an "autocatalytic method" where the "active material is disposed in a hollow shell" with the hope of the reaction propagating inward (and thus improving its efficiency as it exploded); 5. another "autocatalytic method" whereby active material is contains "enough boron to make the mass just critical", and by adding more active material a reaction would start which would, as it proceeded, compress the boron and decrease its effectiveness at absorbing neutrons and thus increase the efficiency of the reaction. (Note that #4 and #5 were considered fairly speculative even in 1943 and were eventually disproven as feasible designs.)

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• Manhattan Project
• Los Alamos Primer