Re: How many people participate in designing and building a nuclear weapon

Dear Alejandro,

You have asked a very difficult question! It is difficult for two reasons:
building a nuclear weapon is very complicated, and the exact number is
classified.

There are many roles for many different people. The design of the actual
nuclear weapon (the pit, where fusion and fission take place) is done by
nuclear weapons physicists and engineers. In fact, different people with
different training design the primary, or fission part, and the secondary,
or fusion part. The design of the rest of the weapon-- the conventional
high explosive used to start the fission chain reaction, the various safety
devices, the casing, the missile, etc, are all done by different people. It
also takes many people to actually build these weapons-- in some cases,
many thousands of people. People are needed to mine uranium, to make it
into usable fuel, to design, build, run, and maintain nuclear reactors to
produce plutonium, process the plutonium, and finally manufacture it into
pits. 

The primary and secondary design teams are small, with a few to a few dozen
people on them. The total number of people working in the nuclear weapons
complex in the US is over 10,000. All of the people involved have some sort
of specialized training, ranging from Ph.D.s in advanced physics and
engineering, to metallurgy, to mining.

There really is no "complete" information about nuclear bombs, as that
information is a closely guarded secret. However, the books by Richard
Rhodes (
The Making of the Atomic Bomb and 
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb) are good histories of
nuclear weapons in the United States.

Hope this helps!