No matter what you’re investigating—the inside of a nuclear weapon, the interior of a giant planet, the core of a star, or the flow from a supernova—physics is physics, atoms are atoms, and high-pressure situations are high-pressure situations.
That’s all self-evidently true, but it was illuminating for me to realize, over and over again while researching this book, how much of the basic science astronomers and physicists use to understand the world is also relevant to nuclear weapons-related research. For example, some of the biggest experimental instruments that the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration oversee contribute to both. Take a device called the Z machine, housed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. It uses huge bursts of electrical current to generate enormous magnetic fields, create intense temperatures and high pressures, and produce X-rays. Scientists use the Z machine to investigate high-energy density physics and fusion energy and to map the different layers of planets like Jupiter and Saturn. But they can also use it to figure out, for example, how different materials would behave if a nuclear weapon blew up nearby.
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