...this time with (reasonable) accuracy.
In the wake of the NorK Nuke test, someone linked to the Wikipedia entry on on krytrons (which turn out to be pretty much what I'd always thought they were, with a minor twist), which eventually led me to this article, which does an alarmingly good job of connecting the dots and filling in many of those little details which have traditionally been obscure (or even intentionally obfuscated).
Mind you, most people don't have access to suitable fissile materials, nor to the required fabrication facilities for making a workable nuke, so the obscurity of these details isn't really all that important; I have to assume that anyone with the resources to build a nuke also has the resources to send innocuous-seeming guys to buy beers for selected geezers and to mine their tales for useful information. Still, I'm not crazy about having so much of it in one easily-found place.
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