For years, people have wondered: "Just what's inside those wacky A-bombs, anyways?"
Well, now you can have the answer!

Modern nuclear weapons are completely different from the old, obsolete, WW-II era designs. Those used a sphere 5 feet in diameter, weighing nearly 10,000 pounds, with 32 huge explosive lenses packed around an inner explosive sphere and then large heavy core assembly. That was in 1945.

By 11 years later, in June 1956, the United States was testing the first of a whole new design concept, the Swan device, which was later used as the Robin Primary in the W-45 nuclear weapon and as the primary or first fission stage of the W-38 and W-47 nuclear warheads on early Atlas, Titan, and Polaris missiles.

The Swan device was less than a foot in diameter and less than two feet long, weighing only 105 pounds. Rather than 32 heavy, thick explosive lenses, it used two lenses, using a completely different mechanism. An air gap lens was used, where a thin layer of explosive drives a thin layer of metal out across an empty, air or vaccum filled gap. The explosive and metal are shaped carefully to form the metal into an imploding perfect sphere, which then impacts and evenly detonates a sphere of high explosive in the center of the bomb. The blast wave moves inwards, accellerating a hollow sphere at its center inwards at high speed. That inner sphere is made of Plutonium, with a thin layer of Beryllium metal acting as a neutron reflector around it. Inside the hollow plutonium sphere is a mixture of a few grams of Deuterium and Tritium gas, which will "boost" the fission bomb by fusing together into helium in a thermonuclear reaction once the fission bomb lights off.

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know Sciences brings you this exciting new design illustration of the Swan device, showing the key design concepts and layout of the device. Classified for 52 years, we have reverse-engineered the design for your amusement!

To avoid unpleasant visits from the FBI, we've carefully filed the dimensions off of this illustration.

As recently as 2007, the Swan device required a Department of Energy Q clearance and Sigma 1 compartment access as Top Secret Restricted Data, Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information - TS(RD)(CNWDI). Now you can own your own copies! See our Cafe Press shop below, buy our T-shirt now, with many other fine fissile products coming soon.

Buy these fine fissile products at our Cafe Press shop, Two Point Designs

• The Nuclear Weapons FAQ
• Nuclear Weapon Design at Wikipedia