>PLACEBO-CONTROLLED, RANDOMIZED, OBSERVER-BLIND, DOSE-FINDING STUDY TO EVALUATE THE SAFETY, TOLERABILITY, IMMUNOGENICITY, AND EFFICACY OF SARS-COV-2 RNA VACCINE CANDIDATES AGAINST COVID-19 IN HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS
This means that some portion of the vaccines administered are actually just placebos.
The Little Boy bomb was exceptionally simple, and built with redundancy in mind. The basis is very simple: take two chunks of fissile material, each formed to be less than critical mass for its particular shape. Assemble them into a supercritical mass very quickly so that no appreciable fission events can occur before the assembly is complete. Include an initiator (a neutron source to start the fission chain reaction) that’s triggered by the actual assembly process. This is a crude, inefficient method that uses an absurd amount of U-235. It’s also guaranteed to work.
As it turns out, Little Boy used four initiators, which seem to be of the same design as that used in the Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb. These initiators use small quantities of polonium carefully plated onto a tiny beryllium sphere. The violent “critical assembly” process smashes that sphere and mixes the polonium and beryllium. What this does is expose the beryllium metal to alpha particles that are continuously emitted by the polonium. This causes the beryllium to emit high energy neutrons, [1] which start the fission chain reaction.
The bomb was built around a modified naval cannon. The uranium target was mounted near the muzzle, and the uranium projectile was pinned in place at the breech. [2] An ordinary, off-the-shelf propellant charge equipped with multiple detonators fired the projectile down the barrel, exactly as would happen in a regular cannon. This part of the bomb used standard, well-tested materials used in thousands of cannons.
To trigger the bomb at the right altitude, Little Boy used what we’d now call a radar altimeter. The device was a regular production radar set being used in fighters to warn of aircraft attacking from behind, so this was well-tested, too. To guard against potential failure, there were four of these radar sets, and when two or more produced a signal that the bomb had reached the detonation altitude, a circuit closed and fired the cannon.
There was no need to test Little Boy, as the chance of it failing was all but zero. I imagine they’d have tested the design if they could have, but a single bomb used almost all the enriched uranium that had been produced at Oak Ridge. It would have taken months to make enough for another bomb.
The Fat Man design was tested because it was using the complex technique of implosion. To make this work, a spherical piece of plutonium roughly the size of a big navel orange was crushed down to a sphere roughly the size of a golf ball. The compression had to happen in fractions of a millisecond, and it had to be uniform. To make this happen, the explosives wrapped around the plutonium core had to produce a perfectly spherical explosion slamming inward instead of out in all directions.
To make the whole process more difficult, the calculations required to design the explosive system are very complex. The entire implosion sequence had to be simulated in very small increments. All they had to perform large numbers of calculations were big mechanical calculators that could only perform the four basic arithmetic functions and punched-card sorters. A spreadsheet was either a literal piece of paper or a blackboard.
This was all new for the Theoretical Division and the Explosives Division at Los Alamos. Nobody had every done anything like this before. Not surprisingly, they weren’t going to trust this design until it was tested.
[1] You might be wondering: if polonium is an alpha emitter, and if alpha particles slamming into beryllium produce neutrons, why doesn’t the initiator always produce neutrons? It’s a good question. The last time I checked, the detailed design of the Urchin initiator was still classified, even after all these years. The non-classified information I’ve found is fairly complete, but lacks a few details.
From what I can see, the polonium metal was encased in some kind of thin shielding layer — my guess is gold foil. When the Urchin was crushed by either implosion or the impact of a big slug of fast-moving uranium, everything would have been pulverized (or vaporized, as the case maybe) and mixed thoroughly.
[2] This is a little known safety feature of the Little Boy bomb. Three copper pins were used to hold the projectile securely in the breech. This kept the projectile from being knocked loose if the bomb was dropped in handling, or if the bomber carrying it crashed. The propellant charge was more than powerful enough to shear the pins off when the bomb was triggered.
Okay, this is gonna be a long read I suppose, so get your other glasses ready to look at this angle.
As you probably know there were no private universities, clinics or schools in USSR. My family member were always a state workers. My mother, father and grandmother are university teahcers. My grandfather was a retired Air Force colonel.
Early 90's hit our family hard when USSR collapsed. Most state-employed workers were royally screwed. My father, mother and grandmother coudn't get any salary for months. And we were a family of 6 (including my brother and I) living together. We only had food thanks to grandfather's relatively high military pension.
My father had to drop his work in the university. He was just a year away from his professor's grade and it is a promising salary in USSR to support the whole family. Well now he became a merchandiser and medical rep. He hated this job. But he had to fed family.
We struggled but we survived mostly thanks to father's switch to this job and grandmom's private lessons (grandfather's pension too, but he died early 2000s).
So when Putin became presidnet things started to change. And drastically. My father could finally get back to work at the university, became a professor. Managed to finally earn nice money with his lections and trips as a contractor professor to another universities. Salaries started to increase and we could afford a nice car, new apartment, summer house. It was not all flowers and unicorns but we eventually felt the positive changes as a family.
Now imagine how many families share our experience in Russia. You'll understand the support numbers for Putin in Russia (which are not far from true).
You can hate Putin if you want, you do you. But my take is Putin gets a lot of hate for few reasons:
He replaced some oligarchs with his trusted people. He took oil business from Khodorkovsky, for instance.
My take: Khodorkovsky appropriated strategically important state industry, never paid a dime of taxes and sold crude oil directly overboard to other countries as a cheap "borehole fluid". Basically used country's resource to himself. Putin finally made oil industry to fill budget through proper taxes, which provides for better medicine, education, social projects for citizen.
2. He made his own people more influential in a lot of industries, making them in charge.
My take: be honest, if you were a President who would you place in charge of important strategic industries? People you know (friends, former co-workers etc) or some guys who might be tied to foreign government and cspecial services? I guess the answer is ovbious, that's just how political power works worldwide, Putin and Russia are no different.
3. He remains at power for so many years.
My take: modern democracies proved that actuall change rate of faces at power, like president, tells nothing about country's welfare, rights, democratic values. Just look how they jailed the guy who won elections in Romania simply because they didn't like the result. The democracy Western countries sell worldwide as a domimant value means nothing. They can change it overnight if needed. They can imprison anyone, destroy any competition if they want so in the moment (look at France, for instance).
TL;DR: The objectvive facts are the following: Putin became the best mediator for Russian powerhouse clans. He managed to strike deals with internal powers, share their areas of influence the way it settled and ensured the stability and economical growth. Made them work for the good of the country. People understand and respect that because it's no easy task. People see the day-to-day positive changes in their lives. And they support it, and so Putin as well.
Yes, the conflict is a terrible thing, because every war is terrible. Does that make majority of people think they should go topple Putin because of that? No, not going to happen. People don't want the history of my family and their families to repeat once again. We support stability. And some things are good, some are bad that's common everywhere.
I hope that gives you angle and clarifies a lot of questions.
Edit: some typos tomassively • 8mo ago
That's was a very interesting and insightful answer, thank you very much! I find it very interesting to hear from someone like you, how life was before Putin and before the Soviet Union fell, and after.
While you touch on it in the end there, I'd love to ask how you see the Russian people's opinions on the current war? While I understand that seeing this from a Russians perspective that have lived the life you have, disagreeing with a war, isn't necessarily enough to lose the support. However, are people like you worried about the outcome?
Thanks so much for you insight!
Name:
Anonymous2025-11-20 15:47
121y243uy345yu8 • 8mo ago
I am pro Putin Russian from Ukraine. I see this current conflict like fight between father and mother over children, because mom has an affair on the side and her lover beat her head with empty promises and set against her husband. Children won't see one parent anymore, and some children dies while mother don't care about them, only about her new lover. u/ArugulaElectronic478 avatar ArugulaElectronic478 • 8mo ago
Is it Californium 252 or 251? Because californium 252 has a half-life of about 80 years whereas Californium 251 has a half-life of over 900 years and a slightly lower critic
Castle Bravo (1954) was expected to produce ~6 megatons, mostly from fusion.
Instead, it yielded 15 megatons — more than double.
The surprise came from the uranium-238 tamper (outer casing). Designers thought it would be “inert,” but the intense flux of fast neutrons from fusion reactions caused it to undergo fast fission.
This fission of the uranium casing contributed the majority of the yield.
Analyses after the test estimated that about 10–13 megatons of the total 15 Mt came from fission, and only ~2–3 Mt from fusion.
That works out to roughly 85–90% fission yield, with 87% often cited as the best estimate.
