re: #263 Flyers1974

I believe in science but I sure don’t understand it.

Then I failed to explain it well.

There are many different techniques to tell one isotope or element from another. For instance, all atoms, because of their electron structures, literally, how many electrons they have and in what orbits, absorb and radiate certain frequencies of light. In other words, sodium for instance gives off a lot of bright yellow light. In fact, it is two shades of yellow that are very close together. It also gives of some other colors less so, and the rest, not at all.

As a result, each element has a fingerprint associated by which colors it gives off, and you can tell what element you are looking at, by what light it gives off if you heat it up. This is spectral analysis.

There are other techniques you wold use to look at one isotope vs. another. That is another story.

Now, if I go to make the uranium or plutonium core of my bomb, I never use pure uranium or plutonium. I can’t really. There will always be, as a result of the manufacturing process some mix of other crap in there that would be specific to the facilities I used to make the materials and the mines I ultimately got the raw materials from.

Therefore, if I collect the fallout from a bomb, I can look at what trace elements were in it and I can verify whose nuke it was - or at least who made the core.