An Accelerated Collaboration Meets with Beaming Success

摘要

Maintaining a smaller, aging U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without underground nuclear testing requires the capability to verify and validate the complex computer calculations on which stockpile confidence is based. This capability, in turn, requires nonnuclear hydrodynamic tests (hydrotests) that can x-ray stages of the implosion process, providing freeze-frame photos of materials imploding at speeds of more than 16,000 kilometers per hour. The images will yield important information on shapes and densities of metals and other materials under the extreme pressures and temperatures generated by the detonation of high explosives.