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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

One clue might be the scaremongering about "this might help China develop nuclear weapons," as if

A) they didn't already have nukes

B) making your own x86 processors were a prerequisite to nuclear technology

Seriously, we peaked with control logic for nukes in the 70s. China has been able to put their hands on PDP-11s for quite a while now, lol.

It’s not about control logic as supercomputers are used to simulate explosions so you don’t have to do it in the world releasing a lot of radioactivity.

Sure but using that to optimize for yield (ie. scariness) peaked in the 70s too. Like anything past and including tsar bomba ceases to make sense.

But you can not put a tzar bomb on a rocket, that can be fired from a silo or even from a submarine. And to threat America and Europe your rocket need to flight 10000 miles or more and reach Mach 5 or even faster. All possible only with high yield, compact warheads, which the Chinese do not have yet.

Sure, so that takes you into 80s technology. A Nintendo switch destroys a cray y-mp on perf.

The processing power at oak ridge et al AFAIK is spent trying to recover old warheads without testing them, which is a massively harder problem.

Edit: and the Chinese have had their DD-ZF publicly for years now. I feel like they have to have warheads for it. Given where we've known about what warheads they have when, it'd make sense for that to be available currently.

They already have low yield nukes but to develop high yield, compact warheads without much nuclear testing (which can be easily detected and would undoubtedly draw critics from other countries) precise simulation on super computer is necessary. Also to solve fluid dynamics problems (for example to develop advanced jet engines or silent submarine propeller, which the Chinese desperately need), detailed simulation on super computer is absolutely a must. Now running LinPack to show off some nice PR numbers is one thing but actually writing an own efficient (and correct) simulation) on massive parallel systems is a thing of another level. It surely helps if one can draw on the massive highly optimized numerical libraries built for the x86/64 instruction set. It certainly will not hinder either in case one has stolen properties software and code from western companies!

China demonstrated a 4 megaton explosion in 1976. Tsar Bomba was in 1961. You really don't need modern computers for this.

The DF-5 can carry those 4Mt warheads, has a 12k+ km range, and has been around since 1981.

China already had a top supercomputer a long time before this happened. They didn't need x86 for this...

It helps in the future but for this scenario, it makes not difference.

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