The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor

The book is written by a respected author who appears to have become enamored with Theodore Taylor, an nuclear weapons designer. The two traveled to many places together, and the author plied Taylor with questions. The setting was the early 1970s, and nuclear weapons information was still secret, and the nuclear industry still appeared to be viable. Taylor did his best to answer questions and explain nuclear physics without violating classification. Since then, much has changed, and today Taylor could be more specific. When I wrote The Rings of Allah, a story based upon gun-type atomic weapons, I would Goggle the topic to see what was in the public domain before using the material in my book. Frankly, is was amazed and frightened by the amount of nuclear weapons data available on the internet.THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY must be viewed in this context. Also, the author, John McPhee, had to record and then present in a understandable manner, the technical information provided by a remarkable man. The author does not have a degree in physics or nuclear physics, and thus can be excused for not understanding some of what Taylor told him.The book contains a wide ranging view, from Dr. Taylor's perspective, of the early nuclear industry and weapons program. Most of the errors I found are unimportant, since only people in the nuclear weapons program would recognize them. These I attribute to the author not understanding Taylor's remarks. I do take exception to Dr. Taylor's obsession with plutonium as a source of nuclear weapons materials for terrorists. Plutonium is the wrong choice for complex technical reasons. Should a terrorist obtain weapons grade plutonium (Pu-239), he would most likely accidentally assemble a critical mass, a self sustaining nuclear fission reaction--the equivalent of a nuclear reactor melt down. In other words, a small Chernobyl.Dr. Taylor grossly oversimplifies explosive implosions spheres. He talks about fabricating one from TNT or C-4, using bowls as a mold. Pure fantasy. He also describes casting plutonium components, half spheres for the "pit" of an implosion device. Yes, in general terms that is how it is done, but he left out a large amount of details. Anyone attempting to follow his crude outline will meet with an untimely end, and so would the neighbors. Perhaps that was his intention.Taylor styles him self as the inventor of several innovative small, high yield nuclear warheads. He looks at nuclear weapons from an inventors perspective, while I look at the weapons from an engineer's and users' perspective. I do not recall coming across his name, but since most of my dealing were with Sandia Corporation and the AEC, this in not surprising. I am, however, familiar with the weapons he mentions. I will only point out one minor mistake: the Mk-41 was similar in physical size to the Mk-17, and had a yield of 25 MT. It was the highest yield nuclear weapon in the U.S. inventory.Taylor's major concern centered on the isotope he worked with--Pu-239. As stated in the book, Pu-239 is superior to U-235 for small, high yield nuclear weapons. Pu is a very toxic, hazardous metal to work with. For example, plutonium has five phases, while most elements have three: solid, liquid, and gas. Recovering Pu-239 from power reactor spent fuel rods is extremely difficult and expensive. Plutonium used in nuclear weapons is produced in a special type of nuclear reactor, a breeder reactor. Iran has one breeder reactor operating and another under construction. Dr. Taylor's warning about nuclear weapons proliferation is right on target.Much of the book is devoted to the danger of theft of nuclear materials from poorly guarded storage facilities. If Taylor were discussing the issues with McPhee today, I believe he would place emphases on two different issues: Poorly guarded spent nuclear fuel rods stored in cement pigs at nuclear reactors, the ideal source of radioactive materials for a dirty bomb; and, nuclear programs in North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran.Today's terrorist nuclear threat is uranium nuclear weapons--gun-type U-235 devices that a terrorist can make if provided with a sufficient amount of highly enriched uranium (90% U-235). Dr. Taylor mentions the Little Boy (page 220), the simple gun-type nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and gun-type nuclear bombs several times. He, Dr. Taylor, finally gets to the real danger on pages 189-191. In 1973, Dr. Taylor, nor I, could envision a world where a rouge nations (North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan) would obtain the ability to produce weapons grade U-235 and Pu-239. Our concern was the Soviet Union and China. Weapon design information did not exist on the internet--there was no interne--and the thought of a nation purposefully provident U-235 and plans for a simple gun-type nuclear device to terrorists was beyond comprehension. Today this situation exists.Today, it is possible to take the Little Boy design, and by incorporating commercially available components, build a nuclear device with a yield several times the Little Boy. A that can be disassembled and imported as parts into the U.S. or any other nation. I tell such a story in my first novel. I wish Dr. Taylor was alive to comment on my work. I found his story fascinating.The CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY is a thought provoking, enlightening, if out of date, book. Reading it will be time well spent.Lee Boyland, award-winning author

This book was first published in 1973 and its basic premises are straightforward. Plutonium is an almost unavoidable byproduct of a uranium based nuclear power industry. It is incredibly easy to make a working atomic bomb with plutonium. It is also incredibly easy to steal plutonium. It is possible to make a nuclear bomb as small as a rugby football. Terrorism with a plutonium bomb seems to be inevitable.Much of the book is about Theodore Taylor, who was one of America's most brilliant nuclear bomb engineers. Technically, he was a physicist, but he was really lousy at true theoretical physics, and he ended up working at Los Alamos as a nuclear bomb designer only because he had flunked out of the Ph.D program at UC Berkeley. Taylor was more of an inventor with the mentality of an engineer in the way he focused on using best estimates and trial and error experimentation to solve difficult practical problems.Later in his life, Taylor was involved in the abortive Orion project (a space ship that was to be powered by hundreds of small nuclear bombs), and became a strong advocate of improved safeguarding of nuclear materials in the nuclear power industry. It should be clarified that after he quit as a nuclear bomb designer, Taylor never became an anti-nuclear activist. I say this mainly because this book does seem to have been used by the anti-nuclear movement.The remainder of the book is mostly devoted to describing just how lax the safeguarding of nuclear materials was at the time, as well as brief descriptions of the chemical processes needed to isolate enough plutonium from these byproducts to make a crude bomb.One annoying aspect of this book is its coy squeamishness at revealing the secrets of making hydrogen (fusion) bombs. Hydrogen bomb design is actually pretty straightforward once you have a fission bomb to ignite the fusion materials - other books like "Dark Sun" lay out the basic details that this book would not.A major concept missing from this book is that, while stealing several kilograms of plutonium and making one or two plutonium bombs might be fairly simple, when it comes to governments building a nuclear bomb, it is clearly more advantageous to have a complete nuclear industry, so as to be able to build an endless supply of nuclear bombs with either uranium or plutonium. And so these states would want to start by first developing a uranium enrichment capability together with nuclear power plants. This is in fact how things have played out today.And so, this book turns out to be somewhat myopic in its fears. Its warnings against the production of plutonium by the nuclear power industry, while important, and salient at the time (1970's) to the fears of terrorism by small radical groups, pale in comparison to the much greater current problem of global nuclear weapons development by nation-states. The book misses completely the fact that today, almost any technologically advanced country, and many that are not so advanced, can build entire arsenals of nuclear bombs if they want to.Is nuclear war inevitable? That possibility seemed to have faded with the breakup of the Soviet Union, but has risen again as the numbers of conflict states developing nuclear weapons increase.But then look on the bright side, for all of you liberal, anti-growth, anti-nuclear, anti-people environmentalists out there. The nuclear winter first predicted by Carl Sagan, together with an accompanying drastic reduction in the numbers of homo sapiens defiling this planet, could be just the cures for global warming and global over-population that you are seeking.

An interesting book, that jumps back/forward in time. It should scare you about nuclear material and bombs but the information is all from than 30 years ago and it just doesn't apply today - not that we don't have problems but today's are different problems and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have happened since.It does give some really interesting technical detail for those with a rudimentary knoweldge of physics. 0 stars for out of date worries 4 stars for tech bits = 2 stars overall.

As with all of McPhee's books, a great read

John McPhee é um escritor fenomenal. Ele consegue descrever os tópicos mais difíceis com uma clareza invejável. Neste livro, ele conta a história do físico Ted Taylor e discute os perigos da produção, armazenamento e transporte de material radioativo. O livro é uma mistura de biografia, história, e jornalismo investigativo.