- Hutchinson, Robert. Weapons of Mass
Destruction. London: Cassell, 2003. ISBN 0-304-36653-6.
- This book provides a history and survey of present-day
deployment of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The author,
a former journalist with Jane's, writes from a British perspective and
discusses the evolution of British nuclear forces in some detail.
The focus is very much on nuclear weapons—of the 260 pages of
text, a total of 196 are devoted to nuclear weapons and delivery
systems. Two chapters at the end cover chemical and biological
weapons adequately but less thoroughly. Several glaring technical
errors make one worry about the reliability of the information
on deployments and policy. The discussion of how fission and
fusion weapons function is complete gibberish; if that's what
interests you, the Nuclear Weapons Frequently-Asked Questions
available on the Nuclear Weapons Archive is
the place to go. There is one anecdote I don't recall encountering
before. The British had so much difficulty getting their staged
implosion thermonuclear weapon to work (this was during the years
when the McMahon Act denied the British access to U.S. weapon design
information) that they actually deployed a 500 kT pure fission
weapon, similar to Ted Taylor's “Super Oralloy Bomb” tested in the
Ivy King shot in 1952. The British bomb contained 70 kg of highly
enriched uranium, far more than the 52 kg unreflected critical mass
of U-235. To keep this contraption from going off accidentally in an
aircraft accident, the uranium masses were separated by 450 kg of steel
balls (I'll bet, alloyed with boron, but Hutchinson is silent on this
detail) which were jettisoned right before the bomb was to be dropped.
Unfortunately, once armed, the weapon could not be disarmed, so you
had to be awfully certain you intended to drop the bomb before letting
the ball bearings out.
June 2004 