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Are there any handy exercises about nuclear weapon design that are suitable for advanced undergrads in a nuclear physics or similar level physics course? I'm most curious about questions that actually appeared in textbooks or course homeworks.

It doesn't matter if it's about gun weapon design or implosion weapon design, but it should be suitably idealized so as to be a reasonable exercise for an individual homework assignment in some undergraduate course.

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Hi Jeff - while not a really bad question, this may be too open-ended. Stack Exchange is not the place for questions that are meant to collect lists (especially not lists of anecdotes); we'd rather you ask something precise that has a specific correct answer. I encourage you to edit your question to reflect that and I'll be happy to reopen it. – David Zaslavsky♦ Dec 21 '11 at 5:37
I've removed the reference to anecdotes, restricting the question to exercises found in textbook, which is what I wanted anyways. – Jeff Burdges Dec 21 '11 at 5:41
Thanks for editing, Jeff; that helps, but still you're basically asking for a list of exercises. Plus the "template" answers you included are oddly specific. Basically, it seems like you may have a more focused question in mind but you're not asking it directly; if we can find that more focused question, your post will get a lot better. – David Zaslavsky♦ Dec 21 '11 at 7:11
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In the introduction to a book on scaling laws in statistical physics, I can't remember which, the problem of estimating nuclear yeild from a film of the blast wave is shown and solved. Like all nuclear explosion physics, it is nonrelativistic. I can't think of any relativistic phenomenon. – Ron Maimon Dec 21 '11 at 10:49
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In English, pedagogy refers to "how one should teach", including "how one should keep the students attention". In CS101, one might assign students to write a non-trivial quine, which naturally provides them the theoretical basis for writing a computer virus, but only an idiot would equate the two. Biology classes ask questions about lethal doses. etc. Homework problems are always idealized fragments of real world problems. You should look up this word 'idealized' if you don't know it. example : physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=157406 – Jeff Burdges Dec 21 '11 at 17:24
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closed as not constructive by David Zaslavsky♦ Dec 21 '11 at 5:37

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