From 2002 interview with Philip Morrison:

There was a spill from the P9, the code word for heavy water, on the floor, so of course they rushed out with nice clean rags to try to sop it up. It was worth a dollar a gram or something. And they squeezed it onto a bucket, whereupon Zen sits down on a chair, takes off his shoes and dabbles his feet in the heavy water saying, “I believe I’m the first person in the world to wash my feet in heavy water,” carefully dried it out, put the towels into the bucket, and went away.

This graphic, from the DRDO report about which I previously wrote, depicts various types of retainable ignitors used in solid rocket motors.

DRDO published a report last February titled Ignition System for Solid Rocket Motors. I’m not qualified to assess its accuracy, but it’s still worth a read.

ISPR has a video gane.

Game has highly realistic terrain and weaponry. Fight the terrorists as a Cobra Pilot and SSG Commando in a series of missions in major battles of Anti Terrorist Operations undertaken by Pakistan Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies like Operation Peochar 2009. More missions to come.

Until recently, I hadn’t noticed this NYRB piece by Jessica Matthews titled “The New Nuclear Threat.” She cites books by a few people you’d recognize:

Subscription is required. Here’s the first paragraph:

Seventy-five years ago, at 8:16 on the clear morning of August 6, the world changed forever. A blast equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of TNT, unimaginably larger than that of any previous weapon, blew apart the Japanese city of Hiroshima, igniting a massive firestorm. Within minutes, between 70,000 and 80,000 died and as many were injured. Hospitals were destroyed or badly damaged, and more than 90 percent of the city’s doctors and nurses were killed or wounded. By the end of the year, thousands more had died from burns and radiation poisoning—a total of 40 percent of the city’s population.

I will once more mention the final document of the First Special Session of the General Assembly devoted to Disarmament (1978).The report devotes more space to conventional weapons than I would’ve expected. Take, for example, paragraphs 22-24:

Together with negotiations on nuclear disar- mament measures, negotiations should be carried out on the balanced reduction of armed forces and of conventional armaments, based on the principle of undiminished security of the parties with a view to promoting or enhancing stability at a lower military level, taking into account the need of all States to pro- tect their security. These negotiations should be con-ducted with particular emphasis on armed forces and conventional weapons of nuclear-weapon States and other militarily significant countries. There should also be negotiations on the limitation of international transfer of conventional weapons, based in particular on the same principle, and taking into account the in- alienable right to self-determination and independence of peoples under colonial or foreign domination and the obligations of States to respect that right, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States, as well as the need of recipient States to protect their security.

Further international action should be taken to prohibit or restrict for humanitarian reasons the use of specific conventional weapons, including those which may be excessively injurious, cause unnecessary suffering or have indiscriminate effects.

Collateral measures in both the nuclear and conventional fields, together with other measures specifically designed to build confidence, should be undertaken in order to contribute to the creation of favourable conditions for the adoption of additional disarmament measures and to further the relaxation of international tension.

Here’s what the final document of the First Special Session of the General Assembly devoted to Disarmament (1978) said about chemical weapons:

Along with these measures, agreements or other effective measures should be adopted to prohibit or prevent the development, production or use of other weapons of mass destruction. In this context, an agreement on elimination of all chemical weapons should be concluded as a matter of high priority.

The complete and effective prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of all chemical weapons and their destruction represent one of the most urgent measures of disarmament. Consequently, the conclusion of a convention to this end, on which negotiations have been going on for several years, is one of the most urgent tasks of multilateral negotiations. After its conclusion, all States should contribute to ensuring the broadest possible applica- tion of the convention through its early signature and ratification.

Here is the final document of the First Special Session of the General Assembly devoted to Disarmament (1978).

This idea may seem familiar:

Each country’s choices and decisions in the field of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy should be respected without jeopardizing their respective fuel cycle policies or international co-operation, agreements and contracts for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, provided that the agreed safeguard measures mentioned above are applied.

This interview with Rudolf Peierls (of the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum) contains these comments on fissile material production:

I think the vital step was this, that to separate isotopes on a practical, on a macroscopic scale, seems a crazy idea. It seems like science fiction because nobody had separated isotopes except in microscopic quantities, or perhaps milligram quantities of very light elements where the mass ratio was much bigger and the difference was much bigger between the isotopes and so it was a much easier problem. So to do that with large amounts seemed quite crazy, and therefore, one didn’t practically think about what would happen if we separated 235. Although Heisenberg obviously had that picture, then he thought of that as an academic thing, not something , not as something we practically have.

The Atomic Heritage Foundation has an excerpt of the 1940 Frisch-Peierls Memorandum, which “explains the feasibility of creating an atomic weapon.”

In order to produce such a bomb it is necessary to treat a few hundred pounds of uranium by a process which will separate from the uranium its light isotope (uranium-235) of which it contains about 0.7%. Methods for this separation of isotopes have recently been developed. They are slow and they have not until now been applied to uranium, whose chemical properties give rise to technical difficulties. But these difficulties are by no means insuperable. We have not sufficient experience with large-scale chemical plant to give a reliable estimate of the cost, but it is certainly not prohibitive.

It is a property of these super-bombs that there exists a “critical size” of about one pound. A quantity of separated uranium isotope that exceeds the critical amount is explosive; yet a quantity less than the critical amount is absolutely safe. The bomb would therefore be manufactured in two (or more) parts, each being less than the critical size, and in transport all danger of a premature explosion would be avoided if these parts were kept at a distance of a few inches from each other.

The memorandum adds this observation about a possible German nuclear weapons program:

We have no information that the same idea has also occurred to other scientists but since all the theoretical data bearing on this problem are published, it is quite conceivable that Germany is, in fact, developing this weapon. Whether this is the case is difficult to find out, since the plant for the separation of isotopes need not be of such a size as to attract attention. Information that could be helpful in this respect would be data about the exploitation of the uranium mines under German control (mainly in Czechoslovakia) and about any recent German purchases of uranium abroad. It is likely that the plant would be controlled by Dr. K. Clusius (Professor of Physical Chemistry in Munich University), the inventor of the best method for separating isotopes, and therefore information as to his whereabouts and status might also give an important clue. At the same time it is quite possible that nobody in Germany has yet realized that the separation of the uranium isotopes would make the construction of a super-bomb possible. Hence it is of extreme importance to keep this report secret since any rumour about the connection between uranium separation and a super-bomb may set German scientists thinking along the right lines.