A drawing of an atomic bomb is not an atomic bomb.īut even though the US is fairly tetchy about its bowdlerized bomb drawings, it does better than most other nuclear states. Drawings of this sort could certainly help an incipient nuclear program, but only in the sense that they can guide research questions or general directions. Even if we were talking about blueprints, there are still quite a few steps in between a drawing of a thing and the thing itself. We aren’t really talking about blueprints here - these things aren’t usually to scale, they aren’t designed for engineers to use. This isn’t totally nonsensical: drawings can make immediately clear lots of things that can otherwise hide in technical descriptions, which is one of the reasons that putative drawings of nuclear weapons are one of the topics that originally drew me to the topic of nuclear secrecy.
For reasons that I suspect are deeper than mere policy considerations alone, you can write a lot of things down that you can’t draw, if you’re someone with an actual security clearance. I find the level of abstraction allowed in such drawings to be a little ridiculous, especially when far more detailed technical information is actually declassified. 1 (The basic implosion idea was declassified in 1951 as part of the Rosenberg trial, though there were knowledgable people arguing for it as early as 1945.) Congressional oversight gets itchy when they see something that looks like a “bomb-making guide,” even when it is well-within the limits of security. though I tend to suspect they are based in the fear of scandal more than anything else. Not extremely informative - a ball-within-a-ball - and a heck of a lot less information than you can find from other sources. The reasons for this are ostensibly based in security - terrorists, enemy powers, etc. “Then explodes” puts it a little mildly, I think. From the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
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