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There was a fascinating article in the New Yorker about John Coster-Mullen, a photographer who over many years and using secondary evidence, puzzled out the designs of the first atomic bombs dropped by the United States in 1945. The article is a long but fascinating read, about his process of piecing together clues and photographs and fragments saved by machinists and other people who worked on small pieces of the bombs.
Coster-Mullen has also produced a book about his findings, published in 2003: Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man. His partial diagram of the internals of the Little Boy (the Uranium-fission bomb; the Fat Man was based on Plutonium) is available on Wikipedia under a creative commons license.
I remember when these diagrams first surfaced a few years ago, presumably when this the book first became available. One very interesting item about this process is Coster-Mullen's re-discovery of the central Mechanism of Little Boy. The bomb worked by slamming two sub-critical pieces of Uranium-235 (which undergoes self-accelerating fission) together to form a super-critical piece. The assumed setup always has been that a slug of Uranium was fired into a cup Uranium. The fact was the opposite, as illustrated in the diagram. The target was a cylinder held in the bottom of the bomb, and a hollow cylindrical projectile was fired at it, embracing the target slug.
My interest in this subject is about the physics involved, rather than the destructive possibility. It's also about the process of secrecy vs. discovery, and figuring out how something was made, even as monsterous a device as that one.
