Chapter 224: Firefly Configuration

After reviewing the secret reports from Flying Fish Company and Qingye Aviation, Li Qingye came across more good news.

This good news was reported from Black Tiger Canyon.

「Meanwhile, at Black Tiger Canyon.」

Dr. Levis was in the "mining area."

The so-called mining area was actually a hidden underground experimental site. On the surface, it was a lead-zinc mine belonging to the Qingye Mining Company.

They frequently detonated explosives to create seismic waves, disguising their activities as signs of underground mineral extraction.

The minor seismic waves produced by explosions on the scale of several hundred kilograms would be detected by seismic monitoring stations, but they generally wouldn't arouse suspicion.

The underground of this "mining area" had long since been hollowed out and converted into an experimental facility. Besides an underground tunnel, it contained five subterranean chambers of varying sizes.

Inside Experimental Site No. 3, Dr. Levis, along with his colleagues and research assistants, was busy assembling a device the size of a basketball.

The core of the device was a small, vacuum-sealed space, roughly the size of a sesame seed.

Surrounding this ultra-small near-vacuum space were 16 cones. The apex of each cone had a device resembling the tip of a ballpoint pen. The "ball" held by this "pen tip" was a 0.01-gram sphere of 99.99% pure Uranium-235.

In other words, the device's total uranium fuel was 0.16 grams.

The remaining space within the cones was packed with TNT explosives, totaling 4.8 kilograms of TNT.

The sphere formed by the 16 cones was encased in a 30-millimeter-thick layer of composite material.

This composite layer consisted of three parts: the innermost layer was an alloy radiation reflector; the middle layer was a high-temperature-resistant composite ceramic capable of withstanding 5,836 degrees Celsius; and the outermost layer was an ultra-strong, single-piece cast alloy, robust enough to contain the internal TNT explosion for 3.2 seconds.

The innermost alloy radiation reflector also had another very special function: under ultra-high pressure, it would instantly become a superconductor.

Additionally, metal powder was added between the TNT and the alloy radiation reflector. In the instant of the explosion, this would generate a massive flow of electrons, which would in turn activate the transformed superconductor, creating a powerful magnetic field to confine the explosion for 3.2 seconds.

This meant that after detonating the TNT core, the entire explosive energy would be confined within the sphere for 3.2 seconds.

Don't underestimate these 3.2 seconds. It is this brief window that allows the Uranium-235 spheres at the tips of the cones to be instantly crushed by immense heat and pressure into the near-vacuum space, forcing a violent nuclear fission reaction to occur.

And due to the presence of the magnetic field, the energy of the nuclear explosion was not released immediately but was instead compressed into the very core of the device.

The advantage of this design is a dramatic increase in the efficiency of nuclear fuel fission, allowing the critical mass for a nuclear explosion to be lowered to the milligram level.

This "Firefly-3" before them was the ultra-compact atomic bomb secretly developed by the Black Tiger Canyon base.

It was also one of the few designs selected after Dr. Levis and his team of researchers ran tens of billions of supercomputer simulations, incorporating various new materials from the Homo Sapiens Company.

The entire Firefly-3 device weighed 17.3 kilograms, was loaded with 0.16 grams of 99.99% pure Uranium-235, had an explosive yield of 2.72 tons of TNT, and achieved a nuclear fuel utilization rate of 85.6%.

Once assembly was complete, Dr. Levis and the others, all wearing protective suits, left the experimental site and went to a dedicated data monitoring room.

"Beginning the third test."

"Activating transport system."

An electric railcar carrying the Firefly-3 slowly traveled toward the test site within the experimental facility.

The entire test site was located 343 meters deep underground. It was a hemispherical cavity with a 50-meter radius, surrounded by several layers of artificial structures designed to dampen the explosive shockwave.

"Detonate!"

3.2 seconds later...

BOOM...

A small fireball erupted in the center of the test site, followed immediately by light radiation, ionizing radiation, thermal radiation, and a shockwave.

Various data collectors relayed the detected information back to the biological computers in the monitoring room.

Meanwhile, seismic monitoring equipment in the surrounding area only detected a faint seismic wave, equivalent to an explosion of just a few hundred kilograms of TNT.

In reality, however, the Firefly-3 had produced an explosive yield equivalent to 2.72 tons of TNT.

After reviewing the data, Dr. Levis nodded in satisfaction. "The Firefly-type ultra-compact atomic bomb can now be mass-produced."

"Next up is retrofitting the old warheads," another researcher said.

They had developed this ultra-compact atomic bomb for three main purposes.

One was to conduct nuclear explosion experiments.

This objective had already been achieved. They had successfully conducted three ultra-small nuclear tests in the underground experimental site near Black Tiger Canyon.

And the outside world remained completely unaware.

The key to maintaining secrecy was the sufficiently small explosive yield, averaging only a few tons of TNT. Combined with the experimental site's shock-absorbing structural layers, any external detection would be dismissed as routine blasting for mineral excavation.

The second purpose was to increase nuclear fuel utilization efficiency.

Currently, the Homo Sapiens Company could refine 150-180 kilograms of Uranium-235 per month. This was enough to produce roughly three "Blazing Sun-30" atomic bombs, each with a 300-kiloton yield. A single Blazing Sun-30 required 52 kilograms of Uranium-235, but its fuel utilization rate was only 30%.

They currently had 42 Blazing Sun-30 bombs in their stockpile, along with an additional 283 kilograms of high-purity Uranium-235 raw material.

However, after switching to the new Firefly-type configuration, achieving the same 300-kiloton explosive yield would only require 18 kilograms of Uranium-235.

This meant that if the entire stockpile of Blazing Sun-30s were retrofitted into Firefly-type atomic bombs, they could produce approximately 120 Firefly-type bombs, each with a 300-kiloton yield.

The third purpose.

Was to improve the atomic trigger of the B43 hydrogen bomb. After all, the B43's atomic trigger was a design from America from over fifty years ago. Not only was it extremely wasteful with its nuclear fuel, but its radioactive contamination was also relatively high, and it used plutonium as its raw material.

Dr. Levis not only wanted to use a Firefly-type atomic bomb as the hydrogen bomb's trigger, but he also intended to improve the overall configuration of the B43.

Hydrogen bombs from the early era of the B43 typically had low nuclear fuel utilization rates, only around 15% to 20%.

The "Blazing Sun-100," a B43 knockoff, currently required 50 kilograms of deuterium to achieve a one-megaton-class explosive yield.

However, through supercomputer simulations and the recent Firefly-type atomic bomb tests, Dr. Levis had already identified a path toward hydrogen bomb miniaturization and a method for increasing their fuel utilization efficiency.

A miniaturized hydrogen bomb could likely have its explosive yield compressed to as low as a one-ton level (with the atomic trigger generating 350 kilograms of TNT-equivalent energy). However, its volume would be difficult to reduce, and it would still weigh around 20 kilograms.

According to the models and data Dr. Levis and his team simulated on the supercomputers, a Firefly-type hydrogen bomb could achieve a fuel utilization rate of 80-90%.

If they maintained the same 50-kilogram deuterium load, the yield could reach approximately 6.3 megatons—a 6.3-fold increase in power.

This level of power was clearly excessive. Furthermore, a 900-kilogram warhead was not conducive to lightweight design.

Dr. Levis was already in discussion with the engineers from the nuclear engineering department about developing a new warhead with a 100-kiloton yield and a weight under 100 kilograms.

This aligned with the core strategy of current world powers: using hydrogen bomb warheads in the several-hundred-kiloton range and loading several of them as multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) on a single missile.

The destructive power of ten 100-kiloton hydrogen bombs is several times greater than that of a single 1-megaton hydrogen bomb.

From a cost-performance perspective, medium-yield cluster hydrogen bombs were the current mainstream solution.

The Firefly-type hydrogen bomb had another advantage: its reaction was more complete, resulting in a much lower amount of residual radioactive material. It could essentially be called a clean nuclear bomb.